An all-to-all broadcasting protocol using directional antennas in multi-hop wireless networks

In order to accelerate the information sharing, all-to-all broadcast needs more users to take part in the packet transmission at the same time. Directional antennas, which are capable of forming multiple beams, can provide improved spacial reuse on one hand. On the other hand, through analyzing the contention scenarios listed for multi-hop wireless networks in previous works, we find that the contention method of single transmission could be scheduled to improve the performance on all-to-all broadcast. As it is possible to receive the broadcast for all the receivers in the beam footprint of transmission antennas array, the proposed method activates the nulled beams of some receivers or silent nodes which are covered by the radiation beam to receive more data packets. In this paper, based on a unified algorithm for time division multiple access (TDMA), frequency division multiple access (FDMA) and code division multiple access (CDMA) channel assignment that is referred as the UxDMA algorithm [1], a protocol for all-to-all broadcast is designed to make full use of that contention scheduling method. And to exploit the multi-beam forming capability, multi-beam antenna array (MBAA) is employed by all nodes. Simulations show that the proposed protocol outperforms the original UxDMA algorithm on all-to-all broadcast with not only decreasing the delay and the number of data packet transmissions but also making a better use of the multi-beam antenna.