This paper investigates the benefits and impacts of using directional antennas for multicast communications in ad hoc networks. In terms of signal reception, directional antennas have shown considerable improvement in the performance of all aspects over omni-directional antennas, especially over dense networks with heavy traffic load. In addition, we have found that transmitting multicast packets directionally to known neighboring group members or forwarders can help reduce the average end-to-end packet delay and increase the overall throughput. However, directional transmission of unacknowledged data transfers may result in lower performance in terms of packet delivery ratio than omni-directional transmission in any carrier sensing MAC protocols under moderate load due to the effect from the hidden terminal problem. Both analytical results and simulation results, as well as an acknowledgment mechanism to improve the successful delivery rate of multicast data packets, are presented.
Keywords multicast - ad hoc networks - directional antennas
Prepared through collaborative participation in the Communications and Networks Consortium sponsored by the U.S. Army Research Laboratory under the Collaborative Technology Alliance Program, Cooperative Agreement DAAD19-01-2-0011. The U.S. Government is authorized to reproduce and distribute reprints for Government purposes notwithstanding any copyright notation thereon.