Chain RTS/CTS Scheme for Aerial Multihop Communications

Existing off-the-shelf Wi-Fi technologies lack in terms of providing reliable multihop links for communication-intensive applications. This drawback severely limits the potential of tactical aerial networks, where reliable multihop communication is a must for successful operation. In this paper, we propose a new chain RTS/CTS scheme for multihop communication in Aerial Networks. Our proposed scheme uses the existing IEEE 802.11 Independent Basic Service Set (IBSS) as a stepping stone and extends the capabilities of collision avoidance (CA) mechanism to reserve channels dynamically throughout the multihop communication link. Extensive simulation results, gathered on OMNET++, show 37% throughput improvement in multihop links with 68% increased connection establishment time when compared to existing IEEE 802.11 IBSS with simple channel hopping enhancement.