Flow-driven media access control protocols over mobile long-distance ad hoc networks

In this paper, we propose two flow driven medium access control (MAC) protocols for mobile long distance ad hoc networks, which are suitable for applications in emergency rescue and battlefield communications. The first one is called flow driven MAC (FD-MAC). It is a slot based MAC protocol that combines random and reservation based access scheme. For short-duration data flows, it employs a random access scheme, while for long-duration data flows it employs a flow driven reservation based access scheme. Furthermore, in order to improve the performance of the protocol in networks with short packets, we propose FD-MAC with packet concatenation and packet header compression (CCFD-MAC) protocol. The theoretical boundaries of the flow classification thresholds (FCTs) of both protocols are deduced, and the optimal values of FCTs are obtained. Simulation results show that FD-MAC significantly improves performance in terms of throughput compared with MACA and Slotted ALOHA protocols, and also performs better than IEEE 802.11 in terms of throughput and latency under medium and high traffic loads. In addition, compared with FD-MAC, CCFD-MAC can achieve a further 30% gain in overall throughput, with J slight increments (no more than 80 ms) in latency under high traffic load environment.