Using Entropy Based Clustering Method to Improve the Utilization Heterogeneous Antennas in Ad Hoc Wireless Networks

Directional antennas widely used in IEEE 802.11 series protocols can offer high gain and low interference to other stations. But they also cause some side effects like the hidden terminal and deafness problems, which will deteriorate the performance of the networks significantly. Therefore, omni-directional antennas have to be used in some cases to avoid these problems. So a station equipped with antennas capable of operating in both omnidirectional and directional modes is desired. In this paper, an entropy-based clustering algorithm is proposed to find an improved solution between using omni- and directional antennas, which utilizes the advantage of directional antennas and meanwhile alleviates the effects brought by directional antennas. We compare our proposed algorithms with the traditional ones and the simulation results confirm the effectiveness of our proposed method.