Directional Pulse/Tone Based Channel Reservation

The use of directional antennas in support for ad hoc communications has increased significantly since these antennas provide throughput gain and increase space division. Most of the proposed directional MAC protocols in the literature rely on the use of control frames - such as RTS/CTS - for channel reservation and to reduce the collision probability of data frames. However, RTS/CTS control frames have a high cost as they increase latency and end-to-end delay. The main contribution of this paper is to propose a channel reservation technique based on pulse/tone signals for a model that considers single radio and single channel. Called directional pulse/tone channel reservation (DPTCR), this technique reduces the latency and has a low probability of failure. DPTCR has been validated through a theoretical analysis followed by simulations. The results show that DPTCR is able to provide throughput gains up to 40.6% higher as compared to traditional channel reservation schemes employing RTS/CTS frames.