A novel distributed Flow-Driven TDMA protocol for MANETs

As an important branch of Media Access Control (MAC) protocol for Mobile Ad Hoc networks (MANETs), slotted MAC protocol with high efficiency is to pursue high throughput as well as reduce the overhead. Based on data-flow-classification method which is very mature in Internet, the paper proposes a novel distributed Flow-Driven MAC protocol (FD-MAC) for MANETs. FD-MAC reserves the slots for the elephant flows which are popular in MANETs to improve their throughput and the piggyback reservation technique is used to decrease the overhead. At the same time the mice flows contend for other unreserved slots. Simulation results show that FD-MAC performs superior to IEEE 802.11 protocol in high load environment where vast elephant flows exist. Using FD-MAC, the throughput for the elephant flows is improved up to 45% comparing to IEEE 802.11 protocol and the overhead of FD-MAC is only 10% of IEEE 802.11 protocol.