Impact of antenna beam joining on resource utilization in wireless mesh networks using smart antenna

The last few years have experienced a high growth rate in research area of wireless mesh networks (WMNs). The attractive characteristics of WMN are self-organize and self-configure, low set-up/installation costs, simpler maintenance tasks, and service coverage with high reliability and fault-tolerance. WMN also provides their integration with existing wireless networks such as cellular networks, WLANs, wireless-fidelity (Wi-Fi), and worldwide interoperability of microwave access (WiMAX). WMNs application areas are broadband home networking, community networking and commercial /business networking. We have focused the performance improvement of WMN using the directional antenna in this paper. Spatial Time Division Multiple Access (STDMA) a variant of access method has been used in which same slots can be reused that are sufficiently far apart to avoid the interference but it required scheduling algorithms. Directional antenna uses the different radiation pattern at different instant of time according the direction of communication. Switching from one radiation pattern to other is required when route of communication is changed. Switching from one radiation pattern to other pattern consume energy and take some time to stabilized new radiation pattern. We have analyzed the methods, used for scheduling the time slot and minimize the number of switches for communication.