Design and simulation of a virtual circuit protocol based on TDMA-based Tactical Internet environment

A virtual circuit protocol is designed for TDMA-based tactical Internet (TI) environment. TI is an important part of military applications using ad hoc network technologies. The success of virtual circuit in TI is closely dependent on the scheme of resource reservation at the media access control layer. Firstly, we design a scheme of distributed resource reservation, which reserves resources by the way of the handshake between the sender node and the receiver node. Then, with the scheme of resource reservation, a virtual circuit protocol is designed, which can integrate with the reactive routing protocol and has the function of local repairing. The simulation results show that our protocol can set up a virtual circuit with the low setting-up delay, the low protocol overhead and the high reliability and improve the performance of TI to a certain extent.