Design of reliable MAC protocol for directional broadcasting

The wireless transmission medium inherently broadcasts a signal to all neighbor nodes in the transmission range. Existing asynchronous MAC protocols do not provide a concrete solution for reliable broadcasting in the link layer. This mainly occurs because an omni-directional broadcasting deteriorates the network performance due to the explosive collisions and contentions. This paper proposes a directional broadcasting protocol based on directional antennas, named RMDB (a reliable MAC protocol for directional broadcasting). This protocol utilizes MACA (multiple access and collision avoidance) scheme through 4-way handshake, and DAC (directional antennas control) information to resolve most collision problems associated with an omni-directional antenna. To analyze its performance, RMDB protocol is compared with IEEE 802.11 DCF protocol and the protocol 2 of reference (Y.Tseng et al., 2002) in terms of the success rate of broadcasting and collision rate