A feedback-retransmission based asynchronous frequency hopping MAC protocol for military aeronautical ad hoc networks

Abstract Attacking time-sensitive targets has rigid demands for the timeliness and reliability of information transmission, while typical Media Access Control (MAC) designed for this application works well only in very light-load scenarios; as a consequence, the performances of system throughput and channel utilization are degraded. For this problem, a feedback-retransmission based asynchronous FRequency hopping Media Access (FRMA) control protocol is proposed. Burst communication, asynchronous Frequency Hopping (FH), channel coding, and feedback retransmission are utilized in FRMA. With the mechanism of asynchronous FH, immediate packet transmission and multi-packet reception can be realized, and thus the timeliness is improved. Furthermore, reliability can be achieved via channel coding and feedback retransmission. With theories of queuing theory, Markov model, packets collision model, and discrete Laplace transformation, the formulas of packet success probability, system throughput, average packet end-to-end delay, and delay distribution are obtained. The approximation accuracy of theoretical derivation is verified by experimental results. Within a light-load network, the proposed FRMA has the ability of millisecond delay and 99% reliability as well as outperforms the non-feedback-retransmission based asynchronous frequency hopping media access control protocol.