ADMAC with Integrated Destination Discovery for Ad Hoc Networks

Directional antennas have shown to increase spatial reuse by allowing multiple transmitters and receivers to concurrently communicate using directional beams as long as they do not significantly interfere with each other. This appreciably increases average aggregate throughput of the network. Generally, for high throughput performance the directional MAC (Medium Access Control) protocols choose a random direction for destination's location and subsequent data transmissions. Under situations of heavy load, high mobility and narrow beam-width, frequent updates are required to track the destinations. However, frequent updates may degrade the effective throughput of the network. Hence, we propose a novel Adaptive Directional MAC (ADMAC) protocol with integrated destination discovery that estimates destination's possible search span and then initiates transmission in that search span direction. Another major contribution is the average throughput performance comparison between last sector (LS), random sector (RS) and search span approaches. Average throughput results show an improvement of up to 40 % and greater than 400 %, when compared to the LS and the RS based DMAC protocols, respectively.