Broadcast Traffic in Ad Hoc Networks with Directional Antennas

The authors explore the use of directional antennas to improve the performance of broadcasting in ad hoc networks. They investigate both the performance of unicast traffic in the presence of broadcast traffic, and the performance of broadcast traffic when mixed with unicast traffic, which is different from previous investigations reported in the literature in which broadcast traffic was investigated in isolation. Through extensive simulation experiments with three Medium Access Control MAC schemes, they show that throughput and delay can vary widely even in networks in which nodes are uniformly distributed. They also show that the use of a MAC protocol that utilizes directional antennas can help to improve the performance of broadcast traffic in ad hoc networks, in terms of both throughput and delay, through a more aggressive channel access scheme that maximizes spatial reuse.