Directional CSMA/CA Protocol with Spatial Reuse for mmWave Wireless Networks

In recent years, the millimeter wave (mmWave) technology has gained considerable interest due to the huge unlicensed bandwidth (i.e., up to 7GHz) available in the 60GHz band in most part of world. In this paper, we investigate the problem of medium access control (MAC) in mmWave wireless networks, within which directional antennas are used to combat the high path loss incurred in the 60GHz band. We extend a directional CSMA/CA protocol presented in our prior work by exploiting spatial reuse. The proposed protocol adopts virtual carrier sensing and allows non-interfering links to communicate simultaneously. We present a performance analysis as well as simulations to evaluate the proposed protocol. Our results show that the directional MAC with spatial reuse can achieve considerable performance improvements over the 802.11 MAC and the protocol proposed in our prior work. It introduces low protocol overhead and has robust performance even when the network is heavily congested.