Quarter-Omni: Improving Coverage and Throughput through Partial Directional Communication in IEEE 802.11p WAVE

In the vehicular networking environment employing directional communication for RSU coverage extension, the use of RTS/CTS is essential to cope with exacerbated hidden terminal problem. Depending on how we set the directionality of the RSU and the OBU antenna in RTS/CTS and DATA/ACK exchanges, we can obtain different coverage and throughput performance. We show in this paper that setting the RSU to use omni-directional communication for RTS/CTS while using directional communication for all other cases both at the RSU and the OBU lead to the best performance.