An All-to-All-Broadcast Oriented MAC Protocol Using Directional Antennas in Ad Hoc Networks

In order to share information among all nodes, an all-to-all-broadcast scheme is needed for situation awareness networks. For this type of distributed sensor network, a directional antenna array, called multi-beam adaptive array (MBAA) is proposed to improve the transmission range and reject the interference. In this paper, an all-to-all-broadcast oriented MAC protocol is designed based on receiver-oriented multiple access (ROMA) protocol, which is an efficient MAC protocol exploiting the multi-beam forming capability of MBAA antennas but not designed for the information sharing. For all-to-all-broadcast scheme, the proposed protocol inserts two mini-slots for communication pairs to exchange control information, which helps to decrease the redundant data transmission and quicken the rate of information sharing. The performance of the proposed protocol is studied by the simulations. Compared with the original ROMA protocol, the proposed protocol shows a high performance in all-to-all-broadcast, which proves that the method can be an efficient way for similar MAC protocols to utilize all-to-all-broadcast scheme.