Slot assignment protocol for narrow band waveform for tactical MANETs

Over the past few years, Mobile Ad hoc net-works(MANETs) have gained importance in mission critical environments. Software defined radios(SDRs) have provided MANETs a platform for using Narrowband networking wave-form(NBNW) for concurrent voice and data transmissions. Traditional TDMA MAC protocols are not appropriate for such applications. In this paper we have proposed a distributed TDMA slot assignment MAC protocol for VHF/UHF NBWF operating at 25kHz for SDR MANETs. It is a conflict free slot assignment protocol which has improved the average channel utilization and reduced the control traffic overhead thus utilizing the limited bandwidth more efficiently for tactical MANETs. Nodes autonomously detect any change in network topology and assign slot by using local topology knowledge only. The protocol is employing 5Kbps for control slots traffic and the rest of the bandwidth i.e 20Kbps is utilized by data packets. The main contribution of the proposed technique is designing a protocol that works on very narrow band with low data rate for mobile nodes. The performance of the protocol is evaluated in OMNeT++ and we have shown that improved average channel utilization and reduced control traffic for MANETs is efficiently utilizing NBNW bandwidth than existing protocols.