A Five-Phase Reservation Protocol (FPRP) for Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

A new single channel, time division multiple access (TDMA)-based broadcast scheduling protocol, termed the Five-Phase Reservation Protocol (FPRP), is presented for mobile ad hoc networks. The protocol jointly and simultaneously performs the tasks of channel access and node broadcast scheduling. The protocol allows nodes to make reservations within TDMA broadcast schedules. It employs a contention-based mechanism with which nodes compete with each other to acquire TDMA slots. The FPRP is free of the hidden terminal problem, and is designed such that reservations can be made quickly and efficiently with negligible probability of conflict. It is fully-distributed and parallel (a reservation is made through a localized conversation between nodes in a 2-hop neighborhood), and is thus scalable. A multihop ALOHA policy is developed to support the FPRP. This policy uses a multihop, pseudo-Bayesian algorithm to calculate contention probabilities and enable faster convergence of the reservation procedure. The performance of the protocol, measured in terms of scheduling quality, scheduling overhead and robustness in the presence of nodal mobility, has been studied via simulations. The results showed that the protocol works very well in all three aspects. Some future work and applications are also discussed.