Investigation on performance testing of smart antenna in wireless ad hoc networks

Abstract

Wireless Ad hoc Network WANET is an emerging field in the newlinearea of wireless communication The performance of WANET is mainly newlinelimited due to interference Usually omni-directional antenna is used in newlineWANET which has only limited range of transmission A small portion of the newlinetransmitted power in omni-directional manner is actually received by the newlineintended user while the rest of the power gets wasted and also causes harmful newlineinterference to other users To overcome this, smart antennas are used where a newlinegroup of separate antenna elements are combined with associated signal newlineprocessing algorithm Smart antennas can largely reduce the radio newlineinterference energy consumption and provide extended transmission range newlineThus the utilization of wireless medium and the network throughput gets newlineimproved Node contains smart antenna which can form narrower beam newlinetowards the desired user and nulls towards other interfering users in order to newlinereduce the interference effects IEEE 802point11 Distributed Coordination Function DCF is a widely used Medium Access Control MAC protocol designed basically for omnidirectional antennas For many directional MAC protocols, the Carrier Sense Multiple Access with Collision Avoidance CSMA slash CA acts as the foundation for channel access Recently several MAC protocols are proposed using smart antenna However there are some unique problems such as hidden terminal problem hidden beam problem deafness of nodes head of line blocking problem MAC layer capture problem while using smart antennas and they are adequately addressed in this research. newline newline