A memory-assisted MAC protocol with angular-division-multiplexing in terahertz networks

Terahertz band communication is envisioned as a key technology to satisfy the increasing demand for ultra-highspeed wireless links. In this paper, a memory-assisted medium access control (MAC) protocol with angular-division-multiplexing (ADM) is proposed for the service discovery and communications in the THz network. In particular, the efficiency balance is achieved by equipping the nodes with (i) the omni-directional antennas at the service discovery phase, and (ii) directional antennas for message transmissions. Moreover, the memory is leveraged in the ADM scheme to assist the access point (AP) to skip the unregistered angular slots to improve the network performance. Based on the proposed MAC protocol, the analytical models of the interference, SINR, outage probability, throughput and the delay in the THz network are derived respectively. According to the simulation and numerical analysis, the results show that our proposed MAC protocol can effectively improve the throughput by over 15% and substantially reduce the delay, in comparison with the ADM scheme without the memory guidance.