Beamforming technique to solve the hidden beam problem in wireless communication systems

A new method to deal with the hidden beam problem in carrier sensing medium access (CSMA)-based systems is proposed. The method is based on the modification of the beamformer weights that reduce null depths of any given beam. The proposed technique is applied to uniformly spaced linear antenna arrays with broadsided and end-fired beams to planar beams and to Dolph-Chebychev beams. The throughput of non-persistent CSMA systems using a uniformly spaced broadsided linear antenna array is evaluated and the performance of the proposed technique is compared with that of a original beam in terms of reducing the hidden beam problem. The proposed methodology is shown to be effective in solving the hidden beam problem in a CSMA-based system by reducing the null depths and is shown to yield higher throughput than the original beam.