Delivering the Benefits of Directional Communications for Ad Hoc Networks Through an Efficient Directional MAC Protocol

It is known that wireless ad hoc networks employing omnidirectional communications suffer from poor network throughput and inefficient spatial reuse. Although directional communications are expected to provide significant improvements in this respect, efficient Medium Access Control (MAC) protocols capable of harvesting the benefits of directional communications in the context of ad hoc networks are yet to be seen. In this work we propose a MAC scheme aiming to provide efficient means to explore the transmission range extension and improved spatial division provided by directional antennas. In order to measure the potentiality of our MAC protocol, we have extensively evaluated its performance in terms of average throughput and end-to-end delay under single and multi-hop communication scenarios. The performance evaluation results indicate that our protocol is highly efficient, particularly with increasing number of communications and data rates.