COMPARISON OF COORDINATED AND UNCOORDINATED PHY/MAC SCHEMES FOR BEACONING

Abstract

Beaconing is an important technique for the broadcast of surveillance information, e.g., between aircraft, as well as for the exchange of neighborhood information in mobile ad-hoc networks. For aeronautical communication and surveillance, the scarcity of available spectrum is an important issue. Therefore, this paper compares the spectral efficiency of two advanced beaconing schemes to plain Aloha. The first advanced method uses coordinated medium access within self-organized network cells. The second option is uncoordinated, like plain Aloha, but uses strong error correction coding and successive interference cancellation to receive multiple, overlapping messages. The results show that both advanced solutions promise comparable efficiency well ahead of plain Aloha. While under optimistic assumptions, the coordinated approach could be somewhat ahead of the Advanced Aloha scheme, we argue that the latter is better suited for safety-critical, aeronautical applications, as it does not rely on, e.g., accurate time synchronization between users.