A Power Control Scheme for Directional MAC Protocols in MANET

Higher throughput gains and prolonged life time can be achieved for mobile ad hoc networks (MANET) with nodes equipped with directional antennas. The employment of directional antennas can enhance the spatial reuse by allowing concurrent communications to occur within the same vicinity. Another advantage of directional antennas is the higher gain resulted from its directivity, which can be utilized to reduce the transmission power during a directional transmission. In order to maximize the throughput and energy gains from directional antennas, we propose in this paper a transmission power control scheme for directional medium access protocol (MAC) protocols. The proposed scheme can be integrated to any directional MAC protocol that adopts a single channel for transmission and reception of IEEE 802.11 frames. The proposed power control scheme exploits the temporal directional transmission power correlations that exist between the IEEE 802.11 frames (RTS/CTS/DATA/ACK) for successful communication. Simulation results for different topologies are used to demonstrate the significant throughput and energy gains that can be obtained under the investigated scheme.