Enhancements for IEEE 802.11 networks with directional antennas

Directional antennas have been introduced to improve the performance of 802.11 based wireless networks. Station equipped with directional antennas can beamform data in a specific direction. However, IEEE 802.11 is developed with omni-directional antennas in mind. Thus, deploying IEEE 802.11 in a directional antenna environment leads stations to be conservative in blocking their own transmissions in favor of the ongoing transmissions. In this paper we propose two opportunistic enhancements for the IEEE 802.11 networks using directional antennas. The first enhancement is to augment the 802.11 MAC protocol with additional information (i.e., location of the stations) that gives a node the flexibility to transmit data while there are ongoing transmissions in its vicinity. The second enhancement, using the augmented MAC protocol, alters the way the 802.11 accessing its MAC data queue.