Comparison of BS-MAC and C-MAC for WAIC

Abstract

With the increase of research and application in wireless avionics intra-communications (WAIC) and future requirements for efficiency and flexibility, it is important to choose the right mechanism for a wireless aircraft application. The medium access control (MAC) layers are in charge of the organization of resources, scheduling and user access control policies to a common wireless medium. MAC design are also relevant for an optimum performance of WAICs. For avionics, it will make sense to research which access technology fits better the specific requirements. MAC using Chinese remainder theorem (C-MAC) offer lowpower consumption while maintaining low packet latency for large-scale cluster-based wireless avionics network (WAN). C-MAC performs better than existing TDMA-based MAC protocols, BMA and EMAC, in terms of power consumption and average packet latency. Besides several MAC protocol for WAN, Bitmap-assisted shortest job first based MAC (BS-MAC) is an adaptive time division multiple access based MAC protocol for hierarchical WAN. BS-MAC uses small size time slots, the number of which is more than the number of member nodes, that handle adaptive traffic loads of all members in an efficient manner. More specifically, shortest job first (SJF) algorithm is used to schedule time slots to reduces node's job completion time and to minimize the average packet delay of nodes, and short node address is adopted to identify members nodes to reduces the control overhead and makes the proposed scheme an energy efficient. This paper introduces the basic principles of BS-MAC protocol in details, compares it with the properties of the C-MAC protocol. In particular, we first detail the main specifications for WAIC, and discuss pros and cons of the two protocol versus the avionics requirements. Then we compared throughput, energy efficiency and time delay between BS-MAC and C-MAC through simulations. Finally, we analyze which of the two MACs offers more efficiency and flexibility for the requirements of WAIC.