Location-Based TDMA MAC for Reliable Aeronautical Communications

The growth of data traffic as air traffic increases is leading to bottlenecks. We propose a new time division multiple access (TDMA) protocol termed location-based TDMA (LBTM) to accommodate increasing data traffic and air-to-air communications. LBTM provides all three modes of communication: unicast, multicast, and broadcast. ACK needs a long guard time for reliable multicast in the aeronautical environment, because it is a long distance communication system. LBTM uses location information to overcome this problem. We can reduce the guard time of ACK and prevent collisions. In our scheme, multicast aircraft calculate ACK arrival time to ensure that ACKs arrive at the sender at different times. Therefore, LBTM reduces the amount of guard time of ACK and the total average time to complete a reliable multicast MAC request. This results in a significant increase in network utilization and throughput.