An Improved Multiple Access Protocol for ATN

An improved multiple access protocol for aeronautical telecommunications network (ATN) is proposed, which includes a piggyback reservation mechanism and a retransmission scheme. In the piggyback reservation mechanism, to reserve transmission time slots dynamically for new messages, control messages can be transmitted by being piggybacked in messages with reservation slot(s), and thus avoids the collision of RTS bursts and saves more slots resource than original long transmission multiple access protocol. In the proposed retransmission scheme, if destination station does not receive DATA burst from source station, it will send a CTS burst instead of NACK burst in the slot initially reserved for ACK/NACK burst. Simulation results show that the proposed protocol obviously improves multiple-access performance than the original protocol.