Deterministic vs random access schemes — A case study in mobile ad hoc networks

Protocol sequences offer a good alternative for media access control of mobile ad hoc networks, because they are fully-distributed and do not require a central coordinator. We show that by using suitably designed deterministic scheduling, the performance can indeed be much better than using random and pseudo-random sequences. The reported results indicate that protocol sequences can offer practical solutions to complicated MAC problems in ad hoc networks, such as vehicular ad hoc network (VANET).