A Reservation-Based TDMA MAC Protocol Using Directional Antennas (RTDMA-DA) For Wireless Mesh Networks

A new time division multiple access (TDMA)-based MAC protocol using directional antennas (RTDMA-DA) is presented for wireless mesh networks. RTDMA-DA is fully- distributed, with the nodes needing to reserve time slots in order to transmit packets. To ensure fairness, it makes use of a novel approach to give nodes within their local 1-hop neighborhoods alternating priorities to reserve slots. In addition, RTDMA-DA allows such local reservations to take place throughout the network, making the protocol highly scalable. In the case of nodes with varying bandwidth requirements, dynamic slot reservations can take place, thus increasing the overall bandwidth utilization. The results of the simulations show that RTDMA-DA achieves a saturation throughput of up to 11 times more than 802.11 and is highly scalable.