Efficient neighbour discovery algorithm for maritime mesh networks with directional antennas

The proliferation of wireless transceivers and the availability of unlicensed band has given a boost to the deployment of wireless networks, with the IEEE802.11/WiFi being the major driver in this arena. In this paper, we consider a wireless mesh network designed for long distance communication with a typical deployment scenario of a maritime mesh network. This network uses an antenna system made up of six fixed-beamwidth antennas. Directional antennas are used for both transmission and reception as compared to most other directional antenna schemes which use directional antenna for transmission and omni-directional antenna for reception. Through efficient use of directional antennas for both transmission and reception, and spatial reuse in transmission, we are able to realize a high capacity mesh network. We present practical methods and algorithms for the critical phase in the network operation, namely, neighbour discovery. We also show that our proposed scheme is deterministic and able to complete the task in finite time as compared to randomized and probabilistic schemes which have unpredictable execution times.