A Testbed with a Practical Smart Antenna for Directional MAC Protocols in Ad hoc Networks

Recently, several MAC protocols using directional antennas have been proposed for ad hoc networks, which are mainly evaluated by computer simulations. This paper develops a MAC protocol testbed called TRNC/ESPAR for ad hoc networks, which enables the evaluation of directional MAC protocols as well as omni-directional protocols. At first, we investigate the requirements for the testbed. Based on them, TRNC/ESPAR is designed to consist of ESPAR as a practical smart antenna, IEEE 802.15.4 as a wireless module, GPS and gyro modules to support a location dependant MAC. After describing the detail design, we investigate the basic performance of the testbed and implement CSMA/CA. Implementing one of directional MAC protocols with 4 nodes, DMAC shows that the protocol doubles the throughput compared with CSMA/CA because of SDMA effect but if the pair is too near DMAC throughput degraded in a real environment, which could not be found without the testbed.

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2007
• Where: AINA
• Authors: Hikaru Mitsuhashi, Masahiro Watanabe, Sadao Obana, Masaki Bandai, Takashi Watanabe
• Keywords: Ad Hoc Networks, AINA 2007, Computer Networks, Directional Mac Protocols, MAC Protocols