Directional antennas improve the link-connectivity of interference limited ad hoc networks

We study wireless ad hoc networks in the absence of any channel contention or transmit power control and ask how antenna directivity affects network connectivity in the interference limited regime. We answer this question by deriving closed-form expressions for the outage probability, capacity and mean node degree of the network using tools from stochastic geometry. These novel results provide valuable insights for the design of future ad hoc networks. Significantly, our results suggest that the more directional the interfering transmitters are, the less detrimental are the effects of interference to individual links. We validate our analytical results through computer simulations.Comment: 6 pages, 7 figures, conference proceedings of PIMRC'201

Network Connectivity in Non-Convex Domains With Reflections

Recent research has demonstrated the importance of boundary effects on the overall connection probability of wireless networks but has largely focused on convex deployment regions. We consider here a scenario of practical importance to wireless communications, in which one or more nodes are located outside the convex space where the remaining nodes reside. We call these `external nodes', and assume that they play some essential role in the macro network functionality e.g. a gateway to a dense self-contained mesh network cloud. Conventional approaches with the underlying assumption of only line-of-sight (LOS) or direct connections between nodes, fail to provide the correct analysis for such a network setup. To this end we present a novel analytical framework that accommodates for the non-convexity of the domain and explicitly considers the effects of non-LOS nodes through reflections from the domain boundaries. We obtain analytical expressions in 2D and 3D which are confirmed numerically for Rician channel fading statistics and discuss possible extensions and applications.Comment: 4 pages, 4 figures, lette