Deafness-aware MAC protocol for directional antennas in wireless ad hoc networks

The use of directional antennas is a promising technique for the provision of high-speed wireless local and personal area networks such as IEEE 802.11ac, IEEE 802.11ad, and IEEE 802.15.3c. In this paper, we propose a new directional MAC protocol for wireless ad hoc networks that is referred to as deafness-aware MAC (DA-MAC). Although a significant number of directional MAC protocols have been proposed, they have not comprehensively resolved the deafness problem. Our proposed DA-MAC protocol can distinguish the deafness problem from collisions by employing logical data and control channels. We provide a discrete-time Markov chain model to analyze the impact of deafness for both an existing technique and DA-MAC. Through extensive simulations, we show that our DA-MAC protocol can significantly outperform the other existing techniques with respect to the throughput, deafness duration, energy consumption, and transmission fairness.