On Utilizing Unused Slots In Topology-Transparent TDMA MAC Policies for Ad Hoc Networks

In the age of the Internet of Things, numerous devices of diverse characteristics are communicating with each other. The underlying networks supporting those communications can either use some sort of infrastructure or implement an ad hoc network. For the latter type of networks and depending on the application requirements, Topology-Transparent TDMA MAC policies can be considered as they are inherently suited for dynamic and unstructured topologies. However, such TDMA-based schemes may suffer from low throughput performance, especially in sparse networks, where a significant portion of available time slots remains unused. To address this challenge, a Topology-Transparent TDMA MAC policy is revisited in this paper, which utilizes unused slots by allowing nodes to transmit in them under a common and fixed probability
$p$
. Additionally, an improvement is proposed, where every node can calculate its own individual access probability based on information gathered from its local neighborhood. Simulation results demonstrate that the use of the individual access probability leads to improved performance in terms of system throughput. Moreover, the requirement for assigning a value to probability
$p$
during the network initialization is relaxed, as this value is now calculated dynamically and distributively during the network operation.