A novel MAC protocol for wireless network using multi-beam directional antennas

The use of directional antennas in wireless networks has received growing attention because of its high spatial reuse and high antenna gains. The Medium Access Control(MAC) protocol with directional antennas is nontrivial due to the limitations in wireless environment. The existing protocols commonly assume that the nodes can operate in both directional and omni-directional modes. In this paper, we propose a new MAC protocol for multi-beam directional antennas. In the protocol, each beam-sector has its own control channel, thus the communications among different beam-sectors are independent. It uses the directional network allocation vector(DNAV) to record the establishment processes. After sensing all the sectors of the multi-beam antenna, it uses the global assignment strategy to assign the directional communication channels. Extensive simulation results show that our protocol can significantly improve the throughput of an entire wireless network at the expense of the slightly increased RTS/DRTS requests in the establishment process.