A Receiver-Initiated Directional MAC Protocol for Handling Deafness in Ad Hoc Networks

Abstract — Recently, several MAC protocols using directional antennas, typically referred to as directional MAC protocols, have been proposed for wireless ad hoc networks. Although directional transmissions are expected to provide significant improvements, directional MAC protocols introduce new kinds of problems. One such problem is deafness. Deafness is caused when a transmitter repeatedly attempts to communicate with its intended receiver, but it fails because the receiver has its beam pointed towards a direction away from the transmitter. This paper proposes RI-DMAC (Receiver-Initiated Directional MAC) to address the issue of deafness in directional MAC protocols. RI-DMAC is a combination of sender- initiated and receiver-initiated operations. The sender-initiated mode is the default mode and the receiver-initiated mode is triggered when the transmitter experiences deafness. In RI-DMAC, each node maintains a polling table and polls a potential deafness node using the RTR (Ready To Receive) frame after the completion of every dialog. The experimental results show that RI-DMAC improves throughput and fairness performance compared to existing directional MAC protocols. I

Routing in heterogeneous wireless ad hoc networks

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Civil and Environmental Engineering, 2008.Includes bibliographical references (p. 135-146).Wireless ad hoc networks are used in several applications ranging from infrastructure monitoring to providing Internet connectivity to remote locations. A common assumption about these networks is that the devices that form the network are homogeneous in their capabilities. However in reality, the networks can be heterogeneous in the capabilities of the devices. The main contribution of this thesis is the identification of issues for efficient communication in heterogeneous networks and the proposed solutions to these issues. The first part of the thesis deals with the issues of unambiguous classification of devices and device identification in ad hoc networks. A taxonomical approach is developed, which allows devices with wide range of capabilities to be classified on the basis of their functionality. Once classified, devices are characterized on the basis of different attributes. An IPv6 identification scheme and two routing services based on this scheme that allow object-object communication are developed. The identification scheme is extended to a multi-addressing scheme for wireless ad hoc networks. These two issues and the developed solutions are applicable to a broad range of heterogeneous networks. The second part of the thesis deals with heterogeneous networks consisting of omnidirectional and directional antennas. A new MAC protocol for directional antennas, request-to-pause-directional-MAC (RTP-DMAC) protocol is developed that solves the deafness issue, which is common in networks with directional antennas. Three new routing metrics, which are extensions to the expected number of transmissions (ETX) metric are developed. The first metric, ETX1, reduces the route length by increasing the transmission power. The routing and MAC layers assume the presence of bidirectional links for their proper operation. However networks with omnidirectional and directional antennas have unidirectional links. The other two metrics, unidirectional-ETX (U-ETX) and unidirectional-ETX1 (U-ETX1), increase the transmission power of the directional nodes so that the unidirectional links appear as bidirectional links at the MAC and the routing layers. The performance of these metrics in different scenarios is evaluated.by Sivaram M.S.L. Cheekiralla.Ph.D