The goal of this thesis is to design a novel time-division multiple access (TDMA), medium access control (MAC) layer protocol for directional wireless networks where nodes are not in the sensing range of each other. The main design parameter we consider is that the nodes should behave in a distributed manner, i.e., they should be able to schedule time slots on their own without depending on a central node. This will make the protocol flexile and it can also be deployed in the networks which are power constrained or do not have a central node (such as an access point) available. The nodes are equipped with a single-beam steerable antenna. Past work in TDMA-based protocols mostly focused on selecting the time slots randomly, which might lead to wastage of slots available in the TDMA frame. So, the proposed protocol follows a deterministic procedure and makes use of the routing tables to schedule data transfer between a transmitter and receiver pair. The proposed protocol also includes other features such as throughput scaling, a redundant handshake period to effectively allocate the traffic slots and reduce their wastage and allowing fair channel access among different transmitter and receiver pairs.
