Neighbor discovery algorithms in wireless networks using directional antennas

Abstract

Directional antennas provide great performance improvement for wireless networks, such as increased network capacity and reduced energy consumption. Nonetheless new media access and routing protocols are required to control the directional antenna system. One of the most important protocols is neighbor discovery, which is aiming at setting up links between nodes and their neighbors. In the past few years, a number of algorithms have been proposed for neighbor discovery with directional antennas. However, most of them cannot work efficiently when taking into account the collision case that more than one node exist in one directional beam. For practical considerations, we propose a new neighbor discovery algorithm to overcome this shortcoming. Moreover, we present a novel and practical mathematical model to analyze the performance of neighbor discovery algorithms considering collision effects. Numerical results clearly show our new algorithm always requires less time to discover the whole neighbors than previous ones. To the best of our knowledge, it is the first complete, practical analytical model that incorporates directional neighbor discovery algorithms.