Mitigating Deafness in Multiple Beamforming Antennas

Deafness is considered as a major medium access problem arising due to directional communication in beamforming antennas. In this paper, we provide a novel algorithm for mitigating deafness (AMD) in such antennas. The algorithm extends the directional virtual carrier sensing mechanism by dynamically maintaining parameters for every beam. AMD can easily be implemented with the existing medium access control (MAC) protocols for multiple beamforming antennas. Simulation results show that considerable performance gains can be achieved when the proposed algorithm is employed by the existing MAC schemes.