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SDMAC: Selectively Directional MAC protocol for wireless mobile ad hoc networks

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Abstract

Using directional antennas in wireless mobile ad hoc networks can greatly improve the transmission range as well as the spatial reuse. However, it will also cause some problems such as deafness problem and hidden terminal problem, which greatly impair the network performance. This paper first proposes a MAC protocol called Selectively Directional MAC (SDMAC) that can effectively address these problems and significantly improve the network throughput. Then two improvements on SDMAC are proposed. The first one is to improve the network throughput by scheduling the packets in the queue (a scheme called Q-SDMAC), thus the head-of-line (HOL) blocking problem can be addressed. The second one is to relax the assumption that each node knows the relative directions of its neighboring nodes and use caches to buffer those relative directions (a scheme named Q-SDMAC using cache). Extensive simulations show that: (1) SDMAC can achieve much better performance than the existing MAC protocols using directional antennas; (2) The network throughput can be significantly improved by scheduling the packets in the queue; (3) Using caches can still achieve high network throughput when nodes are moving; and (4) Network throughput decreases when directional antennas have side lobe gain.

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Acknowledgments

The work of Li, Zhai and Fang was supported in␣part by U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) under Grant CNS-0721744 and GrantDBI-0529012. The work of Fang was also supported in part by the National Science Council (NSC), ROC, under the NSC VisitingProfessorship with contract number NSC-96-2811-E-002-010.

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Authors and Affiliations

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

    Pan Li & Yuguang Fang

  2. Philips Research North America, 345 Scarborough Rd, Briarcliff Manor, NY, 10510, USA

    Hongqiang Zhai

  3. Department of Computer Science and Information Engineering, National Taiwan University, Taipei, Taiwan, ROC

    Yuguang Fang

Authors
  1. Pan Li
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  2. Hongqiang Zhai
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  3. Yuguang Fang
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Correspondence to Yuguang Fang.

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Li, P., Zhai, H. & Fang, Y. SDMAC: Selectively Directional MAC protocol for wireless mobile ad hoc networks. Wireless Netw 15, 805–820 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11276-007-0076-z

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11276-007-0076-z

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