Performance Analysis on Utilizing Directional Antenna in High-Density WLAN

In this paper, we present a performance study of applying directional antenna to infrastructure-based wireless LAN networks. We focus on high-density (HD) deployment, in which multiple cells are operated on the same channel due to limited non-overlapped channels, and thus network capacity is limited mainly by co-channel interference. Network throughput and fairness index are studied for performance evaluation. Based on the simulation results, we provide insights on how directional antenna should be implemented in a HD-WLAN and how performance scales with network and antenna configurations.