An adaptive directional MAC protocol for ad hoc networks using directional antennas

A directional antenna can bring benefits in terms of power consumption, spatial reuse, etc. To exploit the advantage of directional antennas and improve the transmission throughput highest, this paper proposes an adaptive directional MAC protocol (ADMAC). By varying the transmission strategy according to the usage of the channel, nodes can send RTS and CTS packets omni-directionally or directionally. Also, this paper proposes a calculation method of virtual carrier sensing with collision avoidance. By the method, ADMAC protocol makes more pairs of nodes transmit and receive data simultaneously without interferences than other MAC protocols for directional antennas. The paper compares the simultaneous delivering nodes and network throughput of ADMAC with DMAC, DVCS and SDMAC under different experiment parameters. The simulation results show that the throughput of ADMAC is higher than the throughput of DMAC, DVCS and SDMAC protocols.