Beamforming in Ad Hoc Networks: MAC Design and Performance Modeling

We examine in this paper the benefits of beamforming techniques in ad hoc networks. We first devise a novel MAC paradigm for ad hoc networks when using these techniques in multipath fading environment. In such networks, the use of conventional directional antennas does not necessarily improve the sy...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:EURASIP journal on wireless communications and networking 2009-01, Vol.2009 (1), Article 839421
Main Authors: Fakih, Khalil, Diouris, Jean-Francois, Andrieux, Guillaume
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Communications Engineering
Engineering
Information Systems Applications (incl.Internet)
Networks
Research Article
Signal,Image and Speech Processing
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Summary:We examine in this paper the benefits of beamforming techniques in ad hoc networks. We first devise a novel MAC paradigm for ad hoc networks when using these techniques in multipath fading environment. In such networks, the use of conventional directional antennas does not necessarily improve the system performance. On the other hand, the exploitation of the potential benefits of smart antenna systems and especially beamforming techniques needs a prior knowledge of the physical channel. Our proposition performs jointly channel estimation and radio resource sharing. We validate the fruitfulness of the proposed MAC and we evaluate the effects of the channel estimation on the network performance. We then present an accurate analytical model for the performance of IEEE 802.11 MAC protocol. We extend the latter model, by introducing the fading probability, to derive the saturation throughput for our proposed MAC when the simplest beamforming strategy is used in real multipath fading ad hoc networks. Finally, numerical results validate our proposition.
ISSN:1687-1499
1687-1472
1687-1499
DOI:10.1155/2009/839421