Power Adaptive, Spatial Distributed MAC (PowSD-MAC):A Long Distance Media Access Protocol for Air-to-Air (A2A) Communication

Abstract

This thesis focuses on an Airplane-to-Airplane (A2A) communication system. We propose an airplane black box data replication application that aims to replicate all black box data to nearby airplanes, thereby avoiding the use of expensive black boxes. We review existing MAC protocols for long distance communication involving high-mobility nodes. In these conditions, it has been shown that contention based protocols are inefficient due to increased packet collisions. In this thesis, we propose a media access protocol called Spatial Distributed MAC (SD-MAC) based on Time Division Multiple Access (TDMA). This protocol allocates slots for packet transmission and provides acknowledgments for reliable communication. SD-MAC also provides adaptive power control for increased spatial re-use, which significantly improves the performance of the protocol. The protocol with adaptive power control is called PowSD-MAC. We compare SD-MAC and PowSD-MAC with tuned-up versions of IEEE 802.11 for varying topologies using different airplane cruise speeds, airplane density, offered load conditions and packet sizes. We evaluate the performance of the proposed protocol in terms of efficiency, reliability and scalability by implementing these protocols in OMNeT++, an event-based network simulator. The results show that PowSD-MAC outperforms IEEE802.11 for a large range of parameters and performance metrics. This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. 0553247.