Exploiting frame aggregation and weighted round robin with beamforming smart antennas for directional MAC in MANET environments

Abstract

The development of Directional Medium Access Control (DMAC) strategies that allow to enhance the limitations due to the use of omnidirectional antennas in Mobile ad Hoc Networks (MANET), introduces several issues that need to be properly addressed such as the Deafness problem. The use of Smart Antenna Systems (SAS) along with Directional Request To Send (DRTS) and Directional Clear To Send (DCTS) could be not sufficient to mitigate the Deafness. In this regard, a sectorized antenna approach together with a frame scheduling mechanism can improve the overall MAC performance while limiting the Deafness; however, the employment of scheduling algorithms without priority such as the Round Robin could limit the network performance especially in terms of Packet Delivery Ratio (PDR) and fairness. For this reason, we propose two approaches: the A-MSDU (Aggregation MAC Service Data Unit) MAC and a WRR (Weighted Round Robin) MAC that could allow to overcome the limitations of the Round Robin scheme applied at MAC layer in order to have an high efficiency in the overall resource allocation. More specifically, obtained results show that, through the use of frame aggregation, it is possible to considerably reduce issues implied by Round Robin such as time slice and network overhead; WRR approach, instead, is able to enhance the overall network fairness by reducing the number of collisions provided by a directional MAC based on Round Robin scheduling; this aspect translates into higher PDR performance compared to Round Robin approach.