On Physical-Aware Directional MAC Protocol for Indoor Wireless Networks

Exploiting antenna directionality provides significant improvements in terms of spatial reuse, in comparison to omnidirectional antennas, leading to higher network capacity. However, this improvement is highly correlated to the presence of the hidden terminal and deafness problems. In this paper we propose to handle the sensed noise and the arrival of corrupted packets events in a way to address these issues. This is achieved by special settings to the so-called Directional NAV, initially proposed to solve the exposed terminal problem, and the introduction of a special directional CTS control packet, sent to identified deaf nodes, as an invitation to resend a new RTS packet. The simulation results elucidate the effectiveness of the proposed features in addressing both hidden terminal and deafness problems, while increasing significantly the network performance.