MAC Protocols for Wireless Mesh Networks with Multi-beam Antennas: A Survey

Multi-beam antenna technologies have provided lots of promising solutions to many current challenges faced in wireless mesh networks. The antenna can establish several beamformings simultaneously and initiate concurrent transmissions or receptions using multiple beams, thereby increasing the overall throughput of the network transmission. Multi-beam antenna has the ability to increase the spatial reuse, extend the transmission range, improve the transmission reliability, as well as save the power consumption. Traditional Medium Access Control (MAC) protocols for wireless network largely relied on the IEEE 802.11 Distributed Coordination Function(DCF) mechanism, however, IEEE 802.11 DCF cannot take the advantages of these unique capabilities provided by multi-beam antennas. This paper surveys the MAC protocols for wireless mesh networks with multi-beam antennas. The paper first discusses some basic information in designing multi-beam antenna system and MAC protocols, and then presents the main challenges for the MAC protocols in wireless mesh networks compared with the traditional MAC protocols. A qualitative comparison of the existing MAC protocols is provided to highlight their novel features, which provides a reference for designing the new MAC protocols. To provide some insights on future research, several open issues of MAC protocols are discussed for wireless mesh networks using multi-beam antennas.Comment: 22 pages, 6 figures, Future of Information and Communication Conference (FICC) 2019, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-12388-8_

Wireless lans with smart antennas /

Smart antenna systems not only enable users to have high quality links but also increase network throughput by allowing spatial reuse of wireless channels by the use of directional transmission. However performance of smart antenna systems is limited because of the increased hidden terminal problem and deafness of nodes. In this work, we have proposed the Angular MAC (ANMAC) protocol that avoids both problems through medium access tables in the nodes that keep track of the locations of the destination nodes as well as all communicating neighbors. We present detailed performance analysis of ANMAC considering different topologies and traffic scenarios, and we show that SDMA cannot be fully exploited without a smart scheduler. We have also proposed ANMAC with Location based Scheduling (ANMAC-LS) and compared its performance with other smart antenna approaches and omni 802.11 MAC. We prove the efficacy of location based scheduling in wireless networks with smart antennas, and we also show the effects of antenna orientation on throughput, using realistic antenna patterns and the ANMAC protocol. We have also analyzed the effect of contention window size on the performance of the network. By adjusting the contention window according to channel conditions, we can always get the maximum network throughput. We propose an updating algorithm for contention window, and we have analyzed the results both analytically and through simulations