A Unified Transmission Service Protocol for Ad Hoc Networks

Ad hoc network consists of a group of mobile nodes that collectively form a wireless network without the aid of any infrastructure. This flexibility introduces new challenges and several medium access control (MAC) protocols have been proposed. However, these proposed protocols are unable to effectively support the diverse transmission services required by higher layer applications. In this paper, we propose a new single channel, time division multiple access (TDMA)-based MAC protocol termed the unified transmission service protocol (UTSP) for ad hoc networks. Our proposed UTSP can effectively support unicast, multicast and broadcast packet transmission. This is accomplished by utilizing the handshake mechanism in the corresponding slots. In this paper we present the UTSP and analyze the performance of it. Simulation results show that our proposed UTSP can utilize the channel capacity effectively.