Mobility independent medium access control in support of multimedia

The time-spread multiple-access (TSMA) family of medium access control (MAC) protocols provides guaranteed channel access to each node within a deterministically bounded delay (see Chlamtac, I. and Farago, A., IEEE/ACM Trans. on Networking, vol.2, no.1, p.23-9, 1994; Chlamtac et al., ACM/IEEE Trans. on Networking, vol.5, no.6, p.804-12, 1997). In TSMA, the delay bound grows only logarithmically with network size, N, but quadratically with the maximum node degree, D: O(D² (log² N/log² D)). We propose the use of a topology control algorithm to bound the maximum node degree within a mobile ad hoc network which can otherwise vary widely due to mobility. We show that when TSMA runs on top of a network whose topology is controlled, it is an ideal MAC protocol to support multimedia applications.