An integrated neighbor discovery and MAC protocol for ad hoc networks using directional antennas

Many MAC sub-layer protocols for supporting the usage of directional antennas in ad hoc networks have been proposed in literature. However, there remain two open issues that are yet to be resolved completely. First, in order to fully exploit the spatial diversity gains possible due to the use of directional antennas, it is essential to shift to the exclusive usage of directional antennas for the transmission and reception of all the MAC layer frames. This would facilitate maximal spatial reuse and will efface the phenomena of asymmetry in gain. Second, in the presence of mobility the MAC protocol should incorporate mechanisms by which a node can efficiently discover and track its neighbors. In this paper we propose PMAC, a new MAC protocol that addresses both the issues in an integrated way. PMAC incorporates an efficient mechanism for neighbor discovery, and a scheduling based medium sharing that allows for exclusive directional transmissions and receptions. We perform analysis and simulations to understand the performance of our scheme. We find that each node, on average, can achieve a per node utilization of about 80 % in static and about 45 % in mobile scenarios. In terms of throughput, our protocol is seen to outperform both the traditional IEEE 802.11 and previously proposed MAC protocols for use with directional antennas in ad hoc networks.