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Directional medium access control for ad hoc networks

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Abstract

Using directional antennas in ad hoc networks may introduce the well-known deafness problem, exacerbate the hidden terminal problem and the exposed terminal problem, add difficulty on mobile communication, and distort the operation of existing routing and TCP protocols. Although a lot of studies have been undertaken on the directional MAC protocols, most of them focus only on one or several aspects in their design and performance evaluations, and a comprehensive comparative study is missing. In this paper, we first explore the design space of directional MAC and present a taxonomy of existing schemes. Then, we discuss the major problems in using directional antennas under different category of MAC schemes. After that, we propose coordinated directional medium access control (CDMAC), a novel directional MAC protocol to improve throughput via facilitating the simultaneous contention-free communications for multiple local node-pairs. We evaluate our CDMAC, one representative existing scheme and IEEE 802.11 via extensive ns2 simulations. Our results show CDMAC provides a satisfactory solution to all the major problems and significantly improves the throughput performance.

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Notes

  1. A node-pair consists of an intended data sender and an intended data receiver with certain data-transmission direction.

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported in part by the U.S. National Science Foundation under grants CNS-0721744 and DBI-0529012. The work of Fang was also supported in part by the National Science Council (NSC), R.O.C., under the NSC Visiting Professorship with contract number NSC-96-2811-E-002-010 and Chunghwa Telecom M-Taiwan Program M-Taoyuan Project.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering, University of Florida, Gainesville, FL, 32611-6130, USA

    Jianfeng Wang, Hongqiang Zhai, Pan Li, Yuguang Fang & Dapeng Wu

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  1. Jianfeng Wang
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  2. Hongqiang Zhai
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  3. Pan Li
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  4. Yuguang Fang
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  5. Dapeng Wu
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Correspondence to Yuguang Fang.

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Wang, J., Zhai, H., Li, P. et al. Directional medium access control for ad hoc networks. Wireless Netw 15, 1059–1073 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11276-008-0102-9

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