Emad Shihab

Wireless and Networking Research Lab
University of Victoria


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A Directional-to-Directional MAC (DtDMAC) protocol

Project proposal:

The use of directional antennas in Ad Hoc networks has received quite a bit of attention in the past few years. This work has been motivated by the unique advantages that these antennas can provide. These advantages include an increase in spatial reuse, and hence network throughput when compared to omni-directional (OD) antennas. However, most current wireless MAC protocols were designed for OD antennas and do not work well when implemented with directional antennas.

One basic assumption that all current proposed protocols make is that nodes can operate in both, Directional or Omni-directional mode. This is a valid assumption, however, implementing such a solution is not cost effective. Our work surrounds the idea of equipping nodes with a single directional antenna, whether it be switched beam or steerable. In essence, we try to address the issues that may arise from such a scenario.

After careful study of the issues that arise from using directional-only antenna at both the sender and the receiver, we propose a directional MAC protocol that is based on the IEEE 802.11 DCF MAC protocol. We study the performance of this protocol and give a list of open issues for future research.

Project schedule

Date
Expected deliverables
Outcome
June 15, 2007 Complete the design of the protocol and start writting simulation code
Complete
July 15, 2007 Complete simulations and start analyzing results. Make improvments to protocol to improve results if needed.
Complete
July 31, 2007 Finish up report and present the protocol and preliminary results to show effectivness of protocol
Complete
August 2007 ~ 2008 Continue to improve the efficiency of the protocol. Also, design an analytical model to evaluate the performance of the protocol.
On going

Project presentation

The project presentation can be downloaded here. [PDF]

Project results

Preliminary results in the project report.

Project report

The project report can be downloaded here. [PDF]

References

[1] A. Nasipuri, S. Ye, J. You, and R.E. Hiromoto. A mac protocol for mobile
ad hoc networks using directional antennas. Proc. IEEE Wireless Comm.
and Networking Conf
., pages 1214–1219, Sept. 2000.


[2] S. Bandyopadhyay, K. Gyoda, K. Hasuike, S. Horisawa, Y. Kado, and
S. Tawara. An adaptive mac protocol for ad hoc networks with directional
antenna. IEICE TRANS. COMMUN., E84-B(11), 2001.

[3] Y. Ko, V. Shankarkumar, and N. Vaidya. Medium access control protocols
using directional antennas in ad hos networks. Proc. INFOCOM 2000,
1:13–21

[4] M. Takai, J. Martin, A. Ren, and R. Bagrodia. Directional virtual carrier
sensing for directional antennas in mobile ad hoc networks. Proc. ACM
MobiHoc
, pages 183–193, Jun. 2002.


[5] R. Ramanathan, J. Redi, C. Santivanez, D. Wiggins, and S. Polit. Ad hoc
networking with directional antennas: A complete system solution. IEEE
Journal on Selected Areas in Comm.
, 23(3):496–506, March 2005.

[6] R. Choudhury, X. Yang, R. Ramanathan, and N. Vaidya. Using directional
antennas for medium access control in ad hos networks. Proc. MOBICOM
2000, 1:59–70, March 2000.

[7] J. Zander. Slotted aloha multihop packet radio networks with directional
antenna. Electronics Letters, 25(25), 1990.

[8] H. Gossain, C. Cordeiro, D. Cavalcanti, and D. P. Agrawal. The deafness problems and solutions in wireless ad hoc networks using directional antennas. In Proceedings of IEEE GLOBECOM, Nov.-Dec. 2004.

[9] S. Vasudevan, J. Kurose, and D. Towsley. On neighbor discovery in wireless networks with directional antennas. In Proceedings of IEEE INFOCOM, March 2006.