Exploring security improvement of wireless networks with directional antennas

Abstract

There are a number of studies on using directional antennas in wireless networks. Many of them concentrate on analyzing the theoretical capacity improvement by using directional antennas. Other studies focus on designing proper Medium Access Control (MAC) protocols to improve the practical network throughput. There are few works on the security improvement using directional antennas. In this paper, we explore the benefits of directional antennas in security improvements on both single-hop and multi-hop wireless networks. In particular, we found that using directional antennas in wireless networks can significantly reduce the eavesdropping probabilities of both single-hop transmissions as well as multi-hop transmissions and consequently improve the network security.