Throughput and energy consumption evaluation in directional antennas mesh networks

Energy Efficiency is an important feature in poor-covered areas where not only the access to a cellular network is scarce but also energy sources are limited. In this paper, we consider a wireless mesh network to act as a local backhaul network to cover rural and remote villages. The shortage of energy in these settlements motivates to optimize the energy consumption of the wireless backhaul network. Therefore, we propose to use Directional Antennas (DAs) to improve the throughput and the network energy consumption. DAs focus the RF signals toward the desired destination, to reduce the collisions and the number of hops between the source and the destination. We provide for both OAs and DAs networks, the number of links (hops) that a packet passes through to reach the destination. Using extensive simulation, we evaluate the network performance in terms of packet loss, mean throughput, mean energy consumption and energy efficiency for the chain and grid topologies. Simulations results show that using DAs improves the throughput and the energy efficiency, and reduce the mean loss ratio, and the consumed energy.