Adaptation delay and its impact on application performance for TDMA ad hoc networks

摘要

With the advances in military ad hoc networking, more capable and adaptive protocol solutions are being proposed and are evolving. Many are based on TDMA. Issues remain, however, concerning the capability of TDMA to adapt to the dynamics of mobile ad hoc networks. To address this issue a general traffic-adaptive TDMA-based ad hoc network using proactive routing is considered. The focal point is to determine how the protocol adaptation delay affects the performance of applications with different delay requirements. Besides the total adaption delays, the individual MAC and routing adaptation delays are also of interest. Results show, among other things, that it will be unfeasible to adapt the protocols to sessions with delay requirements that are too strict. Additional backup mechanisms have to be added to deal with such sessions. Moreover, the adaptation delay for the routing is not as crucial as for the TDMA protocol.