A Dynamic TDMA Scheduling Based Clustering Algorithm for MANETs

With the popularity of wireless devices such as laptops, wireless LAN devices, and wireless sensors, Mobile Ad hoc Networks (MANETs) have attracted increasing attention and extensive research. The challenges of MANET, such as multi-hop routing, dynamic network topology, and scalability, have raised higher requirements for access control protocols. In order to further improve network scalability, we propose a new TDMA protocol (C-TDMA). This protocol introduces the concept of cluster networking based on the USAP protocol. Specifically, by grouping nodes with the same working frequency into virtual clusters and selecting cluster heads based on dynamic and fair weighting methods, the time utilization of data transmission is optimized. In addition, we designed new data structures and frame structures, and used a combination of TDMA and FDMA to divide the channels, improving channel utilization. Simulation studies show that our C- TDMA protocol has better network performance than the USAP protocol as the network scale expands.