Deafness Avoidance in MANETs through Exchange of Link ID Broadcasts

Directional communication in Mobile Ad-hoc Networks (MANETs) helps in mitigating the problems of exposed nodes and interference, while providing better spatial reuse. However, use of directional antenna also leads to the problem of deafness. This paper presents a novel method to mitigate deafness in MANETs. In the proposed method, Request To Send (RTS), Clear To Send (CTS), Data and Acknowledgement (ACK) frames are exchanged directionally. Link Identification (Link ID) broadcasts are used to inform neighbour nodes about ongoing directional communication between two nodes in the network. With the proposed method, nodes in the network take advantage of directional communicating while mitigating the problem of deafness that occurs due to directional communication. Hence, the method presented in this paper enhances performance of the network by mitigating interference, exposed nodes and deafness. This paper presents detailed design and performance analysis of the proposed solution.