New concepts for a decentralized, self-organizing air-to-air radio link

In this paper, a new access scheme for an aeronautical mobile ad-hoc network (MANET) is presented. The access scheme combines the ideas of nested cellular reuse patterns and variable guard times. The nested cellular reuse patterns solve the hidden station and the near-far problem whereas variable guard times ensure the efficiency of this particular access scheme. Conventional approaches for coordinated, consecutive transmissions require fixed guard times. Considering aeronautical MANETs with their large dimensions together with typical aeronautical applications having short message durations, fixed guard times are inefficient, since the ratio between massage duration and guard time becomes too small. An algorithm for calculating the variable guard times in a MANET is presented and a lower bound for the mean required guard time is derived. In addition, the question of message collisions that might influence the stability of the algorithm is addressed.