Performance Evaluation of Single Channel Virtual-Circuit Medium Access Protocols for MANETs

S. Perumal and J. S. Baras

Proceedings of Milcom 2011, pp. 926-931, Baltimore Convention Center, Maryland, November 7-10, 2011.

Abstract

In this paper, we develop and evaluate models for estimating various performance metrics for unicast traffic using a single frequency channel virtual-circuit Medium Access Control (MAC) protocol in mobile wireless ad-hoc networks. Time is divided into periodic frames with a portion reserved for control traffic and the rest divided into timeslots for data traffic. In order to avoid interference between neighboring links, the virtual-circuit MAC protocol uses a set of reservation rules to assign timeslots to links. One such MAC protocol is the hard scheduling mode of the reservation based Unifying Slot Assignment Protocol (USAP) with the number of frequency channels in a frame set to one. We use reduced load loss network models that couple the physical, MAC, and routing layers effects. The blocking probability of a call at a particular link is calculated by considering cliques of neighboring interfering links around the link that cannot transmit simultaneously.  These neighboring interfering links and the conflict graph are calculated using the virtual circuit reservation rules. We compare our results with simulation and show good match for large networks.