Simulation and modeling of a new medium access control scheme for multi-beam directional networking

In this paper, we analyze a new medium access control (MAC) protocol for a multi-beam directional network via high-fidelity simulation using a real-time emulator. Multi-beam directional systems are a novel approach to networking which leverage recent advances in physical layer technology, allowing formation of multiple simultaneous beams in both transmit and receive. These multiple beams significantly reduce the burden some coordination between the transmitter and receiver and enable an uncoordinated, distributed random access scheme that offers high throughput. This paper is the first to characterize the performance of such systems using real-time simulation tools. In addition to implementing the random access scheme, several MAC features are developed that allow for robust communication, such as location tracking and extrapolating neighbor transmit or receive state. For this paper, we implement our protocol in both simulation and a new Extendable Mobile Ad-hoc Network Emulator (EMANE) model that allows for real-time, high fidelity performance evaluation. Using EMANE allows us to better understand the performance of the newly developed protocols by running real-time applications through the network. We show that our results from the EMANE model and simulator coincide with the theoretical network throughput, which allows for empirical characterization of scenarios in which theoretical results have not been derived. Furthermore, through our work, we stress test the EMANE model and quantify the maximum number of nodes that we can operate in real-time. Through this testing, two bottlenecks are identified: 1) infrastructure issues, where the amount of data passed between the servers is too high, and 2) computation issues, where calculating the interference on the packets becomes too time consuming.