Tradeoffs in coordination and performance in medium access scheduling

While ease of use and compatibility drive the requirements of commercial networks, airborne tactical networks require both reliability and efficient use of the limited spectrum resources. Scheduled medium access may be capable of meeting the reliability and efficiency needs of such networks, however most scheduling techniques suffer from significantly higher coordination and computational overheads. In this paper, we examine the problem of generating and propagating schedules for TDMA systems for airborne tactical networks and consider methods for reducing overhead. We examine optimal and suboptimal scheduling algorithms for schedule generation as well as various techniques to improve performance. We also explore the tradeoff between coordination overhead and performance of the network.