Optimal Rate and Beam-Width Control in Wireless Ad-Hoc Networks with Directional Antennas

In this paper we study optimal transmission strategies in wireless ad-hoc networks using directional antennas. Each node is capable of adjusting its transmission rate as well as its transmission and reception beam-widths. We explore the different tradeoffs involved in optimizing the performance. Specifically we look at the problem of optimally allocating the transmission rate given specific transmission and reception beam-widths. We then use those results to find the optimum beam-widths for maximizing the average throughput-distance. We illustrate this two stage optimization algorithm by numerical examples. We show that even when the transmission rate is chosen optimally, a bad choice of beam-width can degrade the performance by over 50%.