Packet Transmission using Radio Access Protocol for Intra-Cluster Communications in Mobile Ad hoc Networks

Mobile Ad hoc Network (MANET) is designed to support flexible and seamless deployment for military and homeland security theatres, where every resource is mobile. The resources include radios and base stations. In this paper, we have considered the MANET architecture in terms of multiple clusters with each cluster containing a set of radios and a base station or a Cluster Head (CH). The number of radios in each cluster is selected based on the tactical operation of MANET for different applications. A radio in one cluster can communicate with a radio in a different cluster. For this to occur, radio in source cluster sends data to its own Cluster Head (intra-cluster communication) and the Cluster Head sends this data to a remote Cluster Head (inter-cluster communication) and ultimately to a remote radio (intra-cluster communication). In this paper, only intra-cluster communication is considered at the IP layer and the Physical Layer, where each radio communicates with the CH. When multiple radios are communicating with the CH, there is a need to support an organized method of sending packets without any contention. This paper presents a novel Radio Access Protocol (RAP) for packet exchanges between radios and the CH. The cluster performance is derived in terms of “effective packet transmission time” from any radio to CH while executing the access protocol. The performance in terms of delay and throughput are presented for different packet sizes. The results show that for a reasonable size of cluster, RAP achieves the throughput greater than 55 percent with minimal delay of transmission of a packet from the radio to the CH. The performance of RAP considers both the IP layer and the Physical layer and the real time system implementation of RAP is done using MATLAB / Simulink and the results are presented.