A Novel Routing-Aware MAC Protocol for Mobile Ad Hoc Network

Most of the MAC and routing protocols proposed for wireless ad hoc networks are based on omni-directional antenna. Omni-directional antenna distributes energy in all directions, not only causing unnecessary interference to other nodes, but also reducing the potential range of the transmission. In this paper, we propose a novel medium access control and routing protocols for wireless ad hoc networks that using directional antennas. Our design mainly focuses on fully employing the range enhancement of directional communication in the multi-hop environment. Beside that, our protocol can alleviate the hidden/exposed terminal problems and node deafness, which remain unsolved in many directional MAC protocols. We implement our protocol in the OPNET environment and study the parameters to optimize its performance. Our preliminary simulation results indicate that our protocol works well and achieves considerably high throughput and low delay in both sparse and dense ad hoc networks.