A Cluster-Dynamic TDMA Slot Assignment Protocol for Large-Scale Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

MANET has been applied to more and more fields. How to design a MAC protocol which allows nodes to access large-scale MANET reliably and rapidly is a crucial challenge. Many currently designed MAC protocols for MANET have some limitations. Some widely used MAC protocols, such as IEEE 802.11 and USAP, are inefficient in large-scale MANET. In this paper, we propose a cluster-dynamic TDMA slot assignment protocol C-DTSAP based on USAP for large-scale MANET. It uses clustering technology to divide the network into many clusters, coordinates nodes to allocate or release slot resources dynamically according to the traffic flows, and resolves the slot conflict between the gateway nodes and its neighbors. Compared with the modified USAP protocol (FC-USAP) which adapts more quickly to changes in network topology than USAP, simulation shows that C-DTSAP has better performance than FC-USAP in large-scale networks, with fast network convergence, small end-to-end delay, high slot reuse ratio, and high traffic received ratio.