Towards bandwidth efficient TDMA frame structure for voice traffic in MANETs

Time division multiple access (TDMA) based channel access is one of the most widely used mechanisms in Mobile Ad hoc Networks (MANET) with its efficient channel access and collision free transmissions at its core. In this paper, we propose a unique TDMA frame format designed specifically for supporting two-way voice communication in bandwidth efficient manner. The proposed algorithm uses single radio channel for both control and data message exchanges and achieves multi-hop communication. As the transmission of control messages in the same channel leads to overhead, we propose a mechanism to share the control slots between the nodes for reducing the control overhead. The TDMA frame design shows the optimized channel sharing based on the periodicity and payload size of a typical voice packet. The experimental analysis is performed on Network Simulator (NS-3) as well as on Linux kernel with Ethernet emulation of wireless network. The experimental results clearly show considerable improvement in bandwidth efficiency over the existing protocols.