BeMAP: BANDWIDTH EFFICIENT MEDIUM ACCESS PROTOCOL FOR TACTICAL MANET WAVEFORMS

MANET is a promising networking technology for tactical network. The behavioural characteristics of MANET like self-forming/healing and bandwidth efficiency mainly depends on the design of underlying MAC protocol. The protocol also plays an important role to meet the dynamics of tactical environment which is characterized by arbitrary and dynamic node topologies along with continuously changing traffic pattern This makes mobile wireless communication complicated and difficult to maintain connectivity. A distributed and dynamic TDMA channel access protocol can manage outgoing traffic based on network degree and traffic type. In this paper a new Bandwidth efficient Medium Access protocol (BeMAP) is proposed. The protocol is based on theidea of applying dynamic control cycle which is adaptive to the current network degree, thus optimally utilizing control slot bandwidth. We also present the use traffic slots for three kinds of slot allocation procedure to effectively utilize data bandwidth that suits various traffic characteristics.