BTRB: Beam Table-Based Reliable Broadcast for Directional Antennas

Directional antennas provide numerous benefits, such as higher gains, increased transmission range, and lower interferences. In this paper, we propose a reliable broadcast protocol for directional antenna referred to as beam table-based reliable broadcast for directional antennas (BTRB). The BTRB employs (1) ACK-based scheme to provide full reliability; (2) spatio-temporal ACK combination to resolve the problems of ACK implosion and transmission delay; and (3) beam table caching to represent spatial relationship among destination nodes in the broadcast group. Performance evaluation has shown that the proposed BTRB shows full reliability and outperforms existing reliable broadcast schemes with respect to transmission delay by about 55%. key words: directional MAC, reliability, broadcast, ACK combination