Year: 2022
Type: conference-paper
Abstract: A node equipped with a multi-beam antenna can achieve a throughput of up to$m$times as compared to a single-beam antenna, by simultaneously communicating on its$m$non-interfering beams. However, the existing multi-beam medium access control (MAC) schemes can achieve concurrent data communication only when the transmitter nodes are locally synchronized. Asynchronous packet arrival at a multi-beam receiver node would increase the node deafness and MAC-layer capture problems, and thereby limit the data throughput. This paper presents an asynchronous multi-beam MAC protocol for multi-hop wireless networks, which makes the following enhancements to the existing multi-beam MAC schemes (i) A windowing mechanism to achieve concurrent communication when the packet arrival is asynchronous, (ii) A smart packet processing mechanism which reduces the node deafness, hidden terminals and MAC-layer capture problems, and (iii) A channel access mechanism which decreases resource wastage and node starvation. Our proposed protocol also works in the networks that deploy the nodes equipped with single-beam as well as multi-beam antennas. Simulation results demonstrate a superior performance of our proposed protocol.
Language: English
Subfield: Computer Networks and Communications
Field: Computer Science
Domain: Physical Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W3217028640