LAUSR

A heterogeneous medium access control (MAC) scheme (with both scheduled and random communications) is proposed for airborne networks. These networks have a hierarchical topology with a small number of powerful aircraft nodes with multibeam antennas and long-distance links at the higher level, and high-density unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) nodes with single-beam directional antennas at the lower level. Our proposed MAC scheme has the following three parts: First, multibeam, long-distance MAC for aircraft to aircraft links: a dynamic, scheduled MAC is proposed to take advantage of the multibeam features to achieve high-throughput transmissions, and the beam locking/synchronization issues are solved; second, uplink MAC for UAV to aircraft communication: conventional IEEE 802.11n MAC is enhanced with fame aggregation and compressive-sensing-based request polling; and third, MAC for UAV to UAV links: IEEE 802.11e DCF MAC is enhanced through parameter adjustment for channel access. Our simulation results show the significant performance improvement over conventional MAC protocols.