Directional Antennas Based MAC Mechanism for Spatial Reuse

A new media access control protocol for a wireless sensor network is presented in this paper, configured with sensor nodes which have several directional antennas. There are lots of cases to need data retransmission because of excessive channel competition and data collisions due to the use of one omnidirectional antenna and single channel in a wireless sensor network. Our MAC protocol aims to supplement such problems of omnidirectional antenna and the disadvantage of protocol for the existing directional antenna. New control frames are defined and applied to make data transmission available only for part of area at which source node and destination node were located, based on the characteristics of directional antenna. In result, the range of data transmission, spatial reuse rate, and energy efficiency can be increased and data throughput can be improved due to the increase of spatial reuse rate.