Fast reservation list-to-send MAC protocol in wireless networks

Fast reservation list-to-send (FRLS) medium access control (MAC) protocol is proposed to apply to wireless networks with long propagation delay. In the protocol, a central control node (CCN) is applied to allocate the channel resources of two channels, and all the nodes transmit packets over the two channels without collision. Packet train transmission mechanism ensures that a number of packets are transmitted continuously with small guard interval and just a one-way propagation delay. Once a node successfully reserves the channel resources for a communication session, it can transmit the whole message without the need of any other reservations, which gain high utilization of the channels. Moreover, CCN can provide uniform time benchmark to make the network working in an asynchronous fashion. Simulation results show that FRLS protocol outperforms centralized scheduling-based MAC (CSMAC) protocol in terms of throughput, average packet access delay and average packet dropping rate, and effectively resolves low channel utilization problem due to long propagation delay.