Abstract Directional antennas have been proposed to improve the performance and capacity of Wireless MAC protocols for

use in Mobile Ad hoc Networks (MANETs). Such antennas focus their beams in the direction of their receiver, allowing more of the signal power to be used in the direction of the transmission and simultaneously reducing the interference in other directions. However, several challenges and design issues arise that have no counterpart in omni-directional antennas -as a result, a large number of directional MAC protocols have been proposed. The thesis has three primary contributions organized into three parts: (1) It analyzes the directional MAC behavior in chain topologies, identifying some interesting interactions with upper layer protocols; (2) It identifies a head of line blocking problem in directional antennas and proposes new queuing policy to address it; and (3) It suggests a mechanism to passively discover directional neighbors and use that information to optimize multi-hop routes in directional antenna systems. In the first part, we study the interaction between a chain connection and an underlying directional MAC. The interaction of high level protocols with MAC in a MANET nvironment is often complex and unpredictable, resulting in unexpected behavior: such effects are well documented with Omni-directional protocols. Thus, we seek to understand whether similar interactions occur with directional antenna, especially when we consider the unique aspects of operation that directional antennas introduce. The problem characterization provides insight into how to design directional MACs to improve the performance of such connections. SAND is designed for sectored-antennas, a low-cost and simple realization of directional antennas that utilize multiple limited beam width antennas. Unlike many proposed directional neighbor discovery protocols, SAND depends neither on omnidirectional antennas nor on time synchronization. SAND performs neighbor discovery in a serialized fashion allowing individual nodes to discover all potential neighbors within a predetermined time. SAND guarantees the discovery of the best sector combination at both ends of a link, resulting in more robust and higher quality links between nodes. Finally, SAND reliably gathers the neighborhood information in a centralized location, if needed, to be used by centralized networking protocols. The effectiveness of SAND has been assessed via simulation studies.

INTRODUCTION 1.1 MOTIVATION Mobile Ad hoc Networks, or MANETs, are an emerging class of wireless networks where mobile wireless devices interact with each other and cooperate on forwarding traffic. The ad hoc is a Latin phrase which means for this (purpose). According to the Cambridge Dictionary, the definition for ad hoc is made or happening only for a particular purpose or need, not planned in advance. The definition point to the main merit of the ad hoc network: the network can be deployed immediately on demand by surrounding nodes without any

fixed infrastructure supporting. Because the ad hoc network is based on peer-to-peer communication, each node in the network is not only a host taking charge of sending and receiving packets but also a router with responsibility for relaying packets for other nodes. The mobile nodes could join and leave the network with freedom, which causes frequent link breaks. This requires the ad hoc network to have high capability of self-organization and maintenance which is fulfilled by utilizing intelligent routing protocol and efficient resource management in a distributed manner. The nature of ad hoc networks makes it highly suitable for many applications. The selfmaintenance and self-configuring is highly suitable for low cost commercial communication systems and temporary communication systems. The following scenarios indicate that there is a huge demand for ad hoc networks. In military environment, ad hoc networks could support reliable, efficient and secure communication between foot soldiers or among high speed mobile military objects such as airplane, warships or tanks. In an emergency situation, especially where the infrastructures are severely destroyed by disasters, ad hoc networks can be deployed quickly and with flexibility to coordinate and organize different rescue groups to work efficiently. In the wireless sensor field, ad hoc networks are applied to offer a wireless communication infrastructure among the sensor devices in different application domains such as environment monitoring and border intrusion detection. Ad hoc networks could form a wireless mesh network which provides an alternative economical data transfer path with the freedom of mobility in residential zones, highways, business zones, important civilian regions or university campus. In short, ad hoc networks provide an easy-deployment and self-organizing independent wireless and mobile communication system for various applications which could support many new services. Protocol design for wireless networks with directional antennas is a challenging problem due to the problems related to directional antennas such as Directional Hidden Terminal problem [6] and the Deafness problem [7]. In addition to these problems, basic network operations such as neighbor discovery become more complicated, as well. Neighborhood information plays an important role in multihop wireless networks for routing, clustering and MAC operation. Neighbor discovery is a relatively simpler problem when omnidirectional antennas are used since a simple broadcast can reach all nodes within the transmission range. The problem, however, becomes more challenging when directional antennas are used due to the following reasons: (i) The limited radial range of the beamwidth of the directional antenna that covers only a fraction of the azimuth. This limitation requires the neighbor discovery scheme to be repeated in different directions to cover the whole azimuth. (ii) Neighboring nodes must know when and where to point their directional beams to discover each other. (iii) Due to non-ideal realizations of directional antennas (i.e., the existence of side lobes), two neighboring nodes might find multiple links between themselves through different Sector-toSector (S2S) links. Many neighbor discovery protocols have been proposed for wireless networks that use directional antennas. The main objective of the these protocols is to discover the neighbors around a node and store the neighborhood information locally. In the literature, three main approaches were used to perform the neighbor discovery. A set of proposed protocols utilize an

omnidirectional antenna to bootstrap the neighbor discovery process [810]. Other protocols require time synchronization to perform neighbor discovery [8,11,12]. Finally, random schemes [13] perform the neighbor discovery by sending Hello packets through different random directions and then listening to another random direction. As discussed in Section 2, all these approaches are associated with significant shortcomings.

1.2 Research problem and scope of the study The wireless medium and the antenna system form the physical layer in the ad- hoc network node. There are four other important layers above the physical layer that processes the packet received from the antenna. The Medium Access Control (MAC) layer is just above the physical layer and is mainly responsible for sensing the channel. It sends the packet only when the channel is idle, receives the packet from the antenna, checks for packet corruption and propagates the received packet to the upper layer if the node is the intended recipient. The routing layer is responsible for finding the routes, possibly multi-hop routes, to the destination and for directing the packet towards the final destination. The transport layer and the application layer have the functionality similar to the wired networks. Traditional wireless communication systems utilize omni-directional antennas which waste channel resource by radiating radio frequency energy in all directions. The current Medium Access Control (MAC) protocols and routing protocols in ad hoc network naturally work well with omni-directional antennas. With the fast development of directional antenna technology, the size of a directional antenna becomes smaller and the cost of it reduces also. The nature of radiating radio energy only towards a certain direction makes directional antennas save more power, increase transmission range and reduce neighborhood interference compared with omni-directional antennas. However, the challenges are always coming together with the opportunities. In ad hoc networks, directional antennas introduce new hidden terminal problem and deafness problem when working with traditional MAC protocols and bring in new neighbor discovery problem and routing overhead problem when working with conventional routing protocols. It motivates many research groups to commit to this field and to propose several modified MAC protocols and routing protocols. The sectorization scheme could reduce the interference level by dividing one cell into several sectors and using directional antenna to radiate/receive radio frequency power in certain sectors. Compared with omni-directional antennas, sectorization scheme support more capacity due to sectorization gain. However, one drawback of conventional sectorization is that signal cannot be separated in the spatial domain which could not carry out spatial interference cancellation or reduction. Another problem is that sectorization could not adjust antenna orientation or beamwidth according to changing traffic condition and propagation environment, which lead to wasting of capacity in sparse traffic sector and blocking traffic in dense traffic sector.

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