Wireless MAC protocols for real-time battlefield communications

Addressing the problem of timely packet transmission in a wireless soft real-time system such as one would find on the battlefield we present five splitting protocols that take packet deadlines into account. Three are blocked access and two are free access algorithms. Mathematical models of the algorithms are developed, and compared with simulations. We show, as expected, that the blocked access algorithms usually offer higher success rates than the free access versions. Of the two best performing blocked access protocols, performance differences are slight on a lightly loaded channel. Under heavy load, however, one is shown to have better performance, and thus would be the best choice for implementation.