A Distributed Reservation and Contention Combined TDMA Protocol for Wireless Avionics Intra-communication Networks

To reduce the structural complexity of the cabin avionics communication system and meet the increasing demand for data exchange, Wireless Avionics Intra-Communication (WAIC) networks attract attentions from the academic and industrial researchers. Based on the analysis of the wired cabin avionics bus communication system and the analysis of the short-range wireless communication technologies, this paper firstly shows that Ultra Wideband (UWB) could be taken as the candidate technology of WAIC networks. To guarantee the maximum data transmission delay and improve the channel utilization, this paper proposes a Distributed Reservation and Contention Combined (DRCC) TDMA protocol for WAIC networks. Firstly, AP allocates the time slots to each node to ensure that each node can reserve the channel to transmit data. This can help guarantee the maximum data transmission delay. Secondly, if a node does not have data to transmit in its reserved slot, then the others nodes can contend to access into this time slot with p-probability. Simulation results show that compared to the fixed allocated TDMA and p-CSMA the proposed DRCC protocol can improve the throughput by 5% and 50%, respectively. And the average delay can be reduced by 4% and 10%.