Performance Evaluation of Directional Adaptive Range Control in Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

This paper presents DARC (Directional Adaptive Range Control), a range control mechanism using directional antennas to be implemented across multiple layers. DARC uses directional reception for range control rather than directional transmission in order to achieve both range extension and high spatial reuse. It adaptively controls the communication range by estimating dynamically changing local network density based on the transmission activities around each network node. The experimental results using simulation with detailed physical layer, IEEE 802.11 DCF MAC, and AODV protocol models have shown the successful adaptation of communication range with DARC for varied network densities and traffic loads. DARC improves the packet delivery ratio by a factor of 9 at the maximum for sparse networks while it maintains the increased network capacity for dense networks. Further, as each node adaptively changes the communication range, the network delivers up to 20% more packets with DARC compared to any fixed range configurations.