Maximizing Throughput by Exploiting Spatial Reuse Opportunities with Smart Antenna Systems

Smart antenna (or Multi-beam antenna) systems can support simultaneous transmissions (or receptions) of multiple packets on different beams using the same channel. However, the network performance highly depends on the transmission scheduling. Based on the cluster topology, this paper aims at developing transmission scheduling approaches with smart antenna systems for maximizing the network throughput and minimizing the transmission delays. Initially, a set of parallel groups are constructed with consideration of the constraints for multi-beam smart antenna systems. Then two scheduling approaches, called MaxPTran and DAS, are proposed for scheduling multiple transmissions on different beams. Performance study reveals that the proposed approaches outperform existing work in terms of network throughput and transmission delay.