Dynamic time slot allocation and stream control for MIMO STDMA in ad hoc networks

Multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) technologies have been shown to potentially improve the performance of network. Many traditional medium access control (MAC) protocols, such as spatial time division multiple access (STDMA), may not support MIMO technologies directly and not make full use of the feature of MIMO, which may be a limitation in the practical application in ad hoc networks. Therefore, in this paper, we propose a dynamic time slot allocation and stream control for MIMO STDMA (DTSMS) protocol to improve STDMA in performance. Utilizing stream control technology of MIMO and reservation scheme, DTSMS makes improvement on network throughput and avoids the mutual interference of neighbor links. Thus, DTSMS can support both unicast and multicast simultaneously. Moreover, we implement the dynamic time slot allocation scheme in DTSMS to guarantee the transmission efficiency of packets with high cross-layer transmission parameters, such as the packet priority, neighbor node density, or link quality. Utilizing the collected cross-layer information, the proposed scheme allocates time slots for all nodes dynamically according to the changes of network topology and nodes’ transmission parameters. Finally, the effectiveness of the protocol is demonstrated by numerical analysis and simulations. The results show that DTSMS outperforms STDMA in terms of network throughput and delay. Furthermore, compared to our previous TTS-MIMO, DTSMS can decrease the delay of packets with high transmission parameters and improve the quality of service (QoS).