Multihop Connectivity of Ad Hoc Networks With Randomly Oriented Directional Antennas

Directional antennas and beamforming can significantly improve point-to-point wireless links when perfectly aligned. In this letter we investigate the extreme opposite where antenna orientations and positions are chosen at random in the presence of Rayleigh fading. We show that while the 1-hop network connectivity is deteriorated, the multihop routes improve, especially in the dense regime. We derive closed form expressions for the expectation of the 1-hop and 2-hop degree, which are verified through computer simulations. We conclude that node density does not greatly affect the number of hops required between stations while simple random beamforming schemes do, thus returning substantial network performance benefits due to the existence of shorter multi-hop paths.