MIMO ad hoc networks with spatial diversity: medium access control and saturation throughput

We consider ad hoc networks with multiple antennas (namely MIMO ad hoc networks), in which the MIMO techniques offer spatial resources - spatial degrees of freedom. We first devise MIMO medium access control (MAC) to exploit spatial diversity. We then propose analytical methods to characterize the saturation throughput of multihop ad hoc networks in the presence of fading. The throughput results show that spatial diversity can yield significant gains in ad hoc networks.