A Rotational Sector-Based, Receiver-Oriented Mechanism for Location Tracking and Medium Access Control in Ad Hoc Networks Using Directional Antenna

The use of directional antenna in wireless ad hoc networks potentially increases simultaneous communication by directing the transmitting and receiving beams towards the receiver and transmitter node as compared to omni-directional antenna, where nodes in the vicinity of a communication are kept silent. However, in order to implement effective directional MAC protocol using directional antenna, a node should know how to set its transmission direction to transmit a packet to its neighbors and to avoid transmission in other directions where data communications are already in progress. So, it becomes imperative to have a mechanism at each node to track the locations of its neighbors and to know the communication status of neighboring nodes. In this paper, we propose a receiver-centric approach for location tracking and MAC protocol. The performance evaluation on QualNet network simulator indicates that our protocol is highly efficient with increasing number of communications and increasing data rate.