Cooperating with Smartness: Using Heterogeneous Smart Antennas in Ad-Hoc Networks

Abstract— The ability of smart antennas to improve performance in a typically constrained ad-hoc network environment, has helped them garner significant attention over the last few years. However, not much light has been shed on wireless adhoc networks that have nodes with varying antenna capabilities. While homogeneous ad-hoc networks with all nodes having the same antenna capabilities will have certain applications, we argue that ad-hoc networks with nodes having heterogeneous antenna capabilities are more likely to be the norm due to a variety of motivating factors. In the context of such heterogeneous smart antenna networks (HSANs), we investigate and motivate the need for a simple form of node cooperation called retransmit diversity. We show that while such a simple form of node cooperation cannot bring significant benefits to homogeneous omni-directional and smart antenna networks, they can bring several folds improvement to heterogeneous smart antenna networks. We then pres...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2007
• Where: INFOCOM
• Authors: Karthikeyan Sundaresan, Raghupathy Sivakumar
• Keywords: Communications, INFOCOM 2007, Node Cooperation, Smart Antenna, Smart Antenna Networks