FD-MAC: A Flow-Driven MAC Protocol for Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

In this paper, we propose a novel medium access control (MAC) protocol called flow-driven MAC (FD-MAC) for mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs). FD-MAC is a slotted MAC protocol that combines random access and reservation-based access, and introduces the concept of "data flow" and a flow-driven mechanism for resource reservation. For short-duration data flows, it employs a random access protocol, while for long-duration data flows it employs a flow-driven reservation-based access protocol. The purpose is to reduce data collision and thus improve channel utilization so that the network performance in terms of throughput is improved. Simulation results show that FD-MAC can significantly improve the performance in terms of throughput compared with the MACA and Slotted ALOHA protocols, and performs better than IEEE 802.11 in terms of throughput and latency under medium and high traffic load.