A Location and Mobility Aware Medium Access Control Protocol for Directional Antenna-Based Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

Abstract

In recent years, the incorporation of the directional antennas within mobile devices has been studied in many areas. The usage of directional antennas can greatly reduce the radio interference, which results in improved utilization of the wireless medium. It becomes practical to exploit the directional antennas in the Medium Access Control (MAC) protocol design. In this paper, a Location and Mobility Aware (LMA) MAC protocol is developed for the mobile ad hoc networks. The predictive location of the mobile devices are adopted to enhance the robustness of the communication linkages while using the directional beams. The deafness problem is also alleviated using the directional listen (D-Listen) mechanism in the proposed algorithm. Under dynamic moving scenarios, both the spatial reuse and the routing efficiency are preserved using the proposed LMA MAC scheme. The performance of the proposed algorithm is evaluated and compared with other existing protocols in simulations.