S-MAC for Wireless Ad Hoc Networks Using Directional Antennas

Directional antennas usage for Medium Access Control (MAC) in Wireless Ad hoc networks has received much attention from researchers as it provides advantages like reduces signal interferences, increase in throughput and better channel reuse. Directional Antennas poses many challenges to be addressed while providing advantages in wireless ad hoc networks like Hidden terminal problems, Deafness, Deaf zone and head of line blocking problem. We observed the existing protocols does not address all the issues and found no protocol that had addressed all the issues. In this paper we propose S-MAC protocol for medium access control in wireless ad hoc networks using directional antennas. S-MAC uses dual channel approach and maintain separate queue for each beam direction. In S-MAC, we address all the challenges imposed by directional antennas and provide a solution to overcome or eliminate the issues. We observed S-MAC outperforms other protocols in terms of throughput while addressing all the issues.