RBRP: A robust broadcast reservation protocol for mobile ad hoc networks

In this paper we present RBRP, a TDMA-based distributed medium access control (MAC) protocol for broadcast reservations in mobile ad hoc networks. Primary design goal of RBRP is robustness of broadcast reservations in the presence of hidden terminals, reservation deadlocks and mobility. Specifically, RBRP is characterized by four important features: (i) a two step signaling process in which the reservation signaling part is completely decoupled from the data portion of the frame; (ii) a multiple mini-slot reservation request phase within a reservation slot to prevent deadlocks; (iii) special signaling at the beginning of every data slot to adapt to topology changes and (iv) an optimization to improve the spatial reuse of the channel, and hence the utilization, with unicast traffic. Using a detailed simulation model in ns-2, we evaluated the performance of RBRP in comparison with the IEEE 802.11 distributed coordination function (DCF) MAC. Our simulation results show that RBRP achieves more than 100% throughput improvement over 802.11 DCF in the presence of hidden terminals and mobility, both for broadcast and unicast traffic, while having comparable performance in a fully connected network.