On Collision-Tolerant Transmission with Directional Antennas

—The application of directional antennas in wireless networks brings numerous benefits, such as increased spatial reuse and mitigated interferences. Most MAC protocols with directional antennas are based on the RTS/CTS mechanism which works well in wireless networks using omni-directional antennas. However, RTS/CTS frames cannot mitigate the interfering nodes completely. Besides, they also contribute a lot to the performance overhead. This paper studies the problem from a new perspective. We analyze the transmission success probability under directional transmission and directional reception when the antenna beamwidth is quite narrow. Motivated by the analytical results, we design a lightweight MAC protocol without RTS/CTS frames. The preliminary results demonstrate that this new protocol performs better than MAC protocols based on the RTS/CTS mechanism. The results also show that a collision-tolerant transmission is feasible under the narrow beam configuration.

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2008
• Where: WCNC
• Authors: Hongning Dai, Kam-Wing Ng, Min-You Wu
• Keywords: Directional Antennas, MAC Protocols, WCNC 2008, Wireless Networks