Research On Wireless Ad Hoc Network Protocols Using Directional Antennas

As the development of antenna technology, directional antennas have been moreand more popular in wireless Ad Hoc networks. During the wireless Ad Hoc networksusing directional antennas, neighbor discovery is to set up communication linksbetween nodes in the network initializing process which is one of the most importantprocesses. Besides, information sharing is an urgent requirement in wireless networksas a result of multimedia application development. But it is hard to follow for wirelessAd Hoc networks lacking of central controller. Wireless Ad Hoc networks usingdirectional antennas will achieve broader application in the future, and neighbordiscovery and information sharing protocol can largely increase the performance inwireless Ad Hoc networks based on directional antenna. The protocols proposed in thepaper have been proven to be more effective, and also bear high reference andimplementation values.In order to solve the problem of neighbor discovery in wireless Ad Hoc networksusing directional antennas, we aimed at the asynchronous protocols for broaderapplication and lower cost. Based on the analysis of the related neighbor discoveryachievements and the properties of wireless Ad Hoc networks and directional antennas,this paper proposes a neighbor discovery protocol including a scan-based neighbordiscovery algorithm SBAN (Scan-Based Asynchronous Neighbor Discovery) whichcan be used in asynchronous situation to complete the neighbor discovery process and aself-adaptive strategy to optimize the network configuration parameters. This protocolgets better performance without the prior-knowledge of the network and the help ofother devices. Furthermore, the protocol analysis and OPNET Simulation results arealso given to verify the performance of this protocol. It can be concluded that ourprotocol has gotten better efficiency of neighbor discovery process in wireless Ad Hocnetworks using directional antennas.Secondly, in order to realize the information sharing in wireless Ad Hoc networksusing directional antennas, we have analysis and summarize the existing routingprotocols and the impact of directional antennas to routings in wireless Ad Hoc networks. After that, this paper also presents an information sharing protocol consistingof a dynamic strategy to divide nodes into groups utilizing the location information ofnodes and communication records in networks and a routing forwarding strategy usingboth directional antennas and omni-directional antennas. The correspondingperformance analysis and simulation results have proven the effectiveness of theproposed protocol.