MA-ADM: A memory-assisted angular-division-multiplexing MAC protocol in Terahertz communication networks

Terahertz band communication is envisioned as a key technology to satisfy the increasing demand for ultra-high-speed wireless links and enable interconnections in a nanonetwork. In this paper, a memory-assisted medium access control (MAC) protocol with angular-division-multiplexing (ADM) is proposed for THz communication networks. The service region of an access point (AP) is divided into multiple angular slots by exploiting the 3D quantized angular space, For efficient service discovery and communications, a node equips with (i) the omni-directional antennas at the service discovery phase, and (ii) directional antennas for message transmissions. Moreover, the memory is leveraged in the ADM scheme to assist the AP to skip the unregistered angular slots to improve the network performance. Based on the proposed MAC protocol, the analytical models of the interference, SINR, outage probability, throughput and the delay in the THz network are derived respectively. According to the simulation and numerical analysis, the results show that our proposed MAC protocol can effectively improve the throughput by over 15% and substantially reduce the delay, in comparison with the ADM scheme without the memory guidance. (C) 2017 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.