| Mobile Ad-hoc Networks (MANET) are a very useful communication utility particularly at the military network edge where ad hoc and mobile behaviors are needed. These edge networks are used to transfer heterogeneous data where some of the traffic is real time, interactive in nature, and demands deterministic Quality of Service (QoS) guarantees. In order to support deterministic QoS, it necessary to employ a Medium Access Control (MAC) scheme capable of allocating a dedicated portion of the channel capacity to a specific node that needs to transmit data with specific constraints being imposed on maximum delay, maximum delay jitter, and/or minimum throughput. In general, MAC protocols use either centralized or decentralized approach to manage and control the resources of the shared channel. The centralized schemes depend on a dedicated node, typically a cluster head in flat topology or tree-root in hierarchical topology. Supporting contention free access to provide deterministic QoS in centralized networks is easier to implement because there is no need to disseminate and maintain common global state information with other network nodes. Unfortunately, the inherent reliance on a dedicated node reduces network resiliency in these schemes due to vulnerability to single point of failure. By contrast, purely decentralized schemes assume that all nodes play an equal role in managing the channel resources which makes them very resilient. In these schemes it is necessary to disseminate and synchronize global state information across all nodes to be able to provide QoS and control channel resources in a consistent fashion. Unfortunately, it is notoriously difficult to guarantee uniform global state information in wireless mobile networking environment due to the highly dynamic topology and the unpredictability of link quality. In this paper we present a fully decentralized Medium Access Control (MAC) protocol to support deterministic QoS in mobile ad-hoc environment. The protocol employs effective techniques to ensure robust yet efficient dissemination and synchronization of global state information among nodes responsible for management and control of the common wireless channel resources. |