An Integrated Scheme for Fully-Directional Neighbor Discovery and Topology Management in Mobile Ad hoc Networks

Abstract

With directional antennas, it is extremely important that a node maintains information with regards to the positions of its neighbors. This would allow the node to "track" the neighbors as they move; otherwise, a node will have to resort to either omnidirectional or circular directional transmissions (or receptions) fairly often. This can be overhead intense and can reduce spatial reuse. Maintaining directional information with regards to a large number of neighbors can itself be expensive; therefore it is important to limit a node's degree. We propose a topology control scheme (Di-ATC) that works with fully directional communications and offers a low degree bound while preserving network connectivity. The key idea is to execute Di-ATC on the discovered neighbors to select and maintain connectivity with only a subset of these neighbors. The members of this subset are those with high angular separations. We perform extensive simulations and demonstrate that our scheme effectively limits node degree while at the same time, preserves network connectivity and achieves low path stretch