Multi-Channel Smart Antennas in Wireless Networks

Mobile ad hoc and mesh networks provide a network-centric operation scheme to provide reliable wireless connection spanning a large distance with relatively low price. In such wireless networks, smart antennas with directional antenna technology is identified as a promising technology to significantly enhance the capability of greatly improving spatial reuse and routing performance. This paper proposes the use of multi-channel beamforming techniques in a wireless ad hoc network that allow simultaneous communications with multiple users in different directions. In the proposed system, a node can significantly increase the capacity of information it can handle. In addition, the proper use of multi-channel beamforming techniques eliminates the deafness problem, thereby secures high data rate channels for prioritized information transmission and dynamically optimize the resource allocation among different data streams.