Performance improvement of ad hoc networks using directional antennas and power control

Abstract

To improve the system performances of wireless ad hoc networks, researchers have proposed many approaches including the use of directional antennas and power control mechanisms. However, most of these works consider only directional transmission, while directional antennas could be used for both transmitting and receiving. Moreover, there is a lack of work that evaluates the impact of power control in heterogeneous ad hoc networks where directional antennas are partially deployed. In this paper, we propose a power controlled directional MAC protocol which enables both directional transmission and reception of all control and data packets. We evaluate our protocol in heterogeneous ad hoc scenario and show how much performance enhancement can be achieved as a result of using both directional antennas and power control.