| Directional antenna is a kind of equipment that can concentrate thetransmission power in a specific area. Due to its high-capacity,anti-jamming and low probability of intercept, directional antenna is nowwidely used in wireless communication especially in militarycommunication. But directional antenna largely changes the topology ofthe whole network since it can only interact within a limited range ofangles. Anypath routing is a kind of route that there is not just a singleroute from source node to the destination node. Compared with traditionalrouting protocols, it chooses a set of forwarding node instead of a singlenode as nodes’ next step by making full use of the character of broadcast inwireless link. Anypath routing can largely increase the performance ofrouting when compared with traditional routing. If we use directionalantennas and anypath routing together in wireless networks, we can makefull use of the advantage of directional antenna and the good performanceof anypath routing to increase the performance of the whole network. Butthere are also many defects, as the forwarding set of anypath routing willbe largely restricted by the directionality of directional antenna.There are many scholars who have made much research on anypathrouting based on omni-directional antenna based wireless network. Butthere is not much research based on directional antenna while anypath routing will have many problems when choosing forwarding set. In thispaper, we conducted our research on anypath routing in wireless networksbased on directional antenna. First, we introduced the characters ofanypath routing, directional antenna. Second, we introduced the problemsthat anypath routing may face when using directional antenna comparedwith omni-directional antenna. Third, we proposed the algorithm onchoosing forwarding set when using directional antenna. And also weconsidered the forwarding set when considering the impact of multirate onanypath routing. Last but not least, we had systematic simulation withOPNET. Simulation results proved that directional antenna could improvethe performance of anypath routing and multirate could also improve theperformance of anypath routing when compared with single rate.Directional antenna will achieve broader application in wirelessnetworks in the future, and anypath routing can largely increase theperformance in wireless networks based on directional antenna. Thealgorithms proposed in the paper have the features of easy implementationand effectiveness, and also bear high reference and implementation values. |
