A busy-tone based MAC scheme for wireless ad hoc networks using directional antennas

Applying directional antennas in wireless ad hoe networks offers numerous benefits, such as extended communication range, increased spatial reuse, improved capacity and suppressed interference. However, directional antennas can cause new location-dependent carrier sensing problems, such as new hidden terminal and deafness problems, which can cause severe penalties to the performance. Recently, a few schemes have been proposed to tackle these problems. However, these methods can provide limited solutions on the hidden terminal and deafness problems. We propose a new MAC protocol, termed the busy-tone based directional medium access control (BT-DMAC) protocol. When the transmission is in progress, the sender and the receiver will turn on their omnidirectional busy tones to protect the transmission. By combining with directional network allocation vector (DNAV), the scheme almost mitigates the hidden and the deafness problems completely. The mechanism increases the probability of successful data transmission and consequently improves the network throughput. This paper describes the BT-DMAC scheme and analyzes its performance. The simulation results also demonstrate the effectiveness of the protocol.