On Reducing Broadcast Transmission Cost and Redundancy in Ad Hoc Wireless Networks Using Directional Antennas

Using directional antennas to conserve bandwidth and energy consumption in ad hoc wireless networks has attracted much attention from the research community in recent years. However, very little research has focused on applying directional antennas to broadcasting. In this paper, we propose a virtual link reduction (VLR)-based broadcasting protocol for ad hoc wireless networks using directional antennas. Based on two-hop neighborhood information, VLR relies on no location nor angle-of-arrival (AOA) information. VLR is a localized or distributed protocol, and it achieves full delivery. VLR operates on top of any existing broadcast routing protocols. In VLR, no node rebroadcasts a given packet more than once. No physical link is actually reduced, but if a packet has already been forwarded to the end node of the current link, the packet is no longer forwarded, that is, this link is virtually reduced. To evaluate the performance of the proposed VLR-based protocol, we conduct extensive simulation, for simplicity, assuming that there is no packet collision, no channel contention, and no mobility. Simulation results show that VLR outperforms most existing omnidirectional and directional broadcasting schemes in the sense that its normalized transmission cost and redundancy are significantly reduced. Based on the results, we conclude that VLR is more bandwidth and energy efficient.