A Refined Topology-Independent Probabilistic TDMA MAC Policy for Ad Hoc Networks

Abstract

Entering the age of the Internet of Things, millions of devices with different requirements and diverse characteristics will soon be interconnected. This interconnection, depending on the scenario, can be achieved either through the cloud or by implementing an ad hoc network. Frequent topology changes and energy consumption issues create the need for researching new MAC Policies that are better suited to tackle the aforementioned problems.In this paper a TDMA Medium Access Control Policy for wireless ad hoc networks is proposed which is unaware of the underlying topology. The proposed policy is based on an already existing topology-independent policy which utilizes the non-assigned TDMA slots by means of transmitting during them probabilistically. The policy suggested here tries to improve by identifying transmissions that have a high chance of creating collisions. Experimental results show that the proposed policy achieves better performance in terms of system throughput and at the same time achieves fewer total transmissions, thus contributing in energy conservation.