Utilizing Beamforming Antennas for Wireless Multi-hop Networks

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Utilizing Beamforming Antennas for Wireless
Multi-hop Networks
Romit Roy Choudhury
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Applications
Several Challenges, Protocols
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Omnidirectional Antennas
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IEEE 802.11 with Omni Antenna
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Y
S
RTS
D
CTS
X
K
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IEEE 802.11 with Omni Antenna
silenced
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Y
silenced
S
Data
D
ACK
silenced
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K
silenced
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IEEE 802.11 with Omni Antenna
silenced
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Interference management A crucial challenge
for dense multihop networks
S
Data
D
ACK
silenced
X
K
silenced
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Managing Interference

• Several approaches
• Dividing network into different channels
• Power control
• Rate Control

New Approach Exploiting antenna capabilities to
improve the performance of wireless multihop
networks
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From Omni Antennas
silenced
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S
D
silenced
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K
silenced
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To Beamforming Antennas
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S
D
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K
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To Beamforming Antennas
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S
D
X
K
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Today

• Antenna Systems ? A quick look
• New challenges with beamforming antennas
• Design of MAC and Routing protocols
• MMAC, ToneDMAC, CaDMAC
• DDSR, CaRP
• Cross-Layer protocols Anycasting
• Improved understanding of theoretical capacity
• Experiment with prototype testbed

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Antenna Systems

• Signal Processing and Antenna Design research
• Several existing antenna systems
• Switched Beam Antennas
• Steerable Antennas
• Reconfigurable Antennas, etc.
• Many becoming commercially available

For example
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Electronically Steerable Antenna ATR Japan

• Higher frequency, Smaller size, Lower cost
• Capable of Omnidirectional mode and Directional
  mode

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Switched and Array Antennas

• On poletop or vehicles
• Antennas bigger
• No power constraint

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Antenna Abstraction

• 3 Possible antenna modes
• Omnidirectional mode
• Single Beam mode
• Multi-Beam mode
• Higher Layer protocols select
• Antenna Mode
• Direction of Beam

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Antenna Beam

• Energy radiated toward desired direction

Main Lobe (High gain)
A
Sidelobes (low gain)
Pictorial Model
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Directional Reception

• Directional reception Spatial filtering
• Interference along straight line joining
  interferer and receiver

C
C
Signal
Signal
A
B
A
B
Interference
D
Interference
D
No Collision at A
Collision at A
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• Will attaching such antennas at the radio layer
• yield most of the benefits ?
• Or
• Is there need for higher layer protocol support ?

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• We design a simple baseline MAC protocol
• (a directional version of 802.11)
• We call this protocol DMAC and investigate
• its behavior through simulation

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DMAC Example

• Remain omni while idle
• Nodes cannot predict who will trasmit to it

Y
S
D
X
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DMAC Example

• Assume S knows direction of D

Y
S
D
X
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DMAC Example
Y
S
D
X
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Intuitively
Performance benefits appear obvious
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However
Throughput (Kbps)
Sending Rate (Kbps)
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• Clearly, attaching sophisticated antenna hardware
  
• is not sufficient
• Simulation traces revealed
• various new challenges
• Motivates higher layer protocol design

26

• Antenna Systems ? A quick look
• New challenges with beamforming antennas
• Design of MAC and Routing protocols
• MMAC, ToneDMAC, CaDMAC
• DDSR, CaRP
• Cross-Layer protocols Anycasting
• Improved understanding of theoretical capacity
• Experiment with prototype testbed

27
New Challenges Mobicom 02

• Self Interference
• with Directional MAC

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Unutilized Range

• Longer range causes interference downstream
• Offsets benefits
• Network layer needs to utilize the long range
• Or, MAC protocol needs to reduce transmit power

Data
A
D
B
C
route
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Utilize Range MMAC

• Learn far away neighbor via ngbr discovery
• Approaches proposed in literature
• Send RTS packets over multiple DO links
• Request Rx to beamform back toward Tx
• Tx sends Data over DD link, followed by DD Ack

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New Challenges II

• New Hidden Terminal Problems
• with Directional MAC

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New Hidden Terminal Problem

• Due to gain asymmetry
• Node A may not receive CTS from C
• i.e., A might be out of DO-range from C

CTS
RTS
Data
B
C
A
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New Hidden Terminal Problem

• Due to gain asymmetry
• Node A later intends to transmit to node B
• A cannot carrier-sense Bs transmission to C

RTS
CTS
Data
Carrier Sense
B
C
A
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New Hidden Terminal Problem

• Due to gain asymmetry
• Node A may initiate RTS meant for B
• A can interfere at C causing collision

Collision
Data
RTS
B
C
A
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New Challenges II

• New Hidden Terminal Problems
• with Directional MAC

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New Hidden Terminal Problem II

• While node pairs communicate
• X misses Ds CTS to S ? No DNAV toward D

Y
S
Data
Data
D
X
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New Hidden Terminal Problem II

• While node pairs communicate
• X misses Ds CTS to S ? No DNAV toward D
• X may later initiate RTS toward D, causing
  collision

Collision
Y
S
Data
D
RTS
X
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New Challenges III

• Deafness
• with Directional MAC

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Deafness

• Node N initiates communication to S
• S does not respond as S is beamformed toward D
• N cannot classify cause of failure
• Can be collision or deafness

M
Data
S
D
RTS
N
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Channel Underutilized

• Collision N must attempt less often
• Deafness N should attempt more often
• Misclassification incurs penalty (similar to TCP)

M
Data
S
D
RTS
N
Deafness not a problem with omnidirectional
antennas
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Deafness and Deadlock

• Directional sensing and backoff ...
• Causes S to always stay beamformed to D
• X keeps retransmitting to S without success
• Similarly Z to X ? a deadlock

Z
DATA
RTS
S
D
RTS
X
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New Challenges IV

• MAC-Layer Capture
• The bottleneck to spatial reuse

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Capture

• Typically, idle nodes remain in omni mode
• When signal arrives, nodes get engaged in
  receiving the packet
• Received packet passed to MAC
• If packet not meant for that node, it is dropped

Wastage because the receiver could accomplish
useful communication instead of receiving the
unproductive packet
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Capture Example
Both B and D are omni when signal arrives from A
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Outline / Contribution

• Antenna Systems ? A closer look
• New challenges with beamforming antennas
• Design of MAC and Routing protocols
• MMAC, ToneDMAC, CaDMAC
• DDSR, CaRP
• Cross-Layer protocols Anycasting
• Improved understanding of theoretical capacity
• Experiment with prototype testbed

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Impact of Capture

• Beamforming for transmission and reception only
• is not sufficient
• Antenna control necessary during idle state also

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MAC Layer Solution

• Capture-Aware MAC (CaDMAC)
• D monitors all incident traffic
• Identifies unproductive traffic
• Beams that receive only
• unproductive packets are
• turned off
• However, turning beams off
• can prevent useful communication in future

C
D
A
B
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CaDMAC Time Cycles

• CaDMAC turns off beams periodically
• Time divided into cycles
• Each cycle consists of
• Monitoring window 2. Filtering window

cycle
1
2
1
1
2
2
time
All beams remain ON, monitors unproductive beams
Node turns OFF unproductive beams while it is
idle. Can avoid capture
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CaDMAC Communication
C

• Transmission / Reception uses
• only necessary single beam
• When node becomes idle, it
• switches back to appropriate
• beam pattern
• Depending upon current time window

D
A
B
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Spatial Reuse in CaDMAC

• During Monitoring window, idle nodes are omni

C
E
D
A
B
F
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Spatial Reuse in CaDMAC

• At the end of Monitoring window CaDMAC identifies
  unproductive links

C
E
D
A
B
F
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Spatial Reuse in CaDMAC

• During Filtering window ? use spatial filtering

Parallel Communications CaDMAC 3
DMAC others 2 Omni 802.11 1
C
E
D
A
B
F
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• Questions?

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ToneDMAC timeline
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Common Receiver
Backoff Counter for DMAC flows
Backoff Values
Backoff Counter for ToneDMAC flows

• Another possible improvement

time
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Network Transport Capacity

• Transport capacity defined as
• bit-meters per second
• (like man-miles per day for airline companies)
• Capacity analysis

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Directional Capacity

• Existing results show
• Capacity improvement lower bounded by
• Results do not consider side lobes of radiation
  patterns
• We consider main lobe and side lobe gains (gm and
  gs)
• We find capacity upper bounded by
• i.e., improvement of

CaDMAC still below achievable capacity
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Discussion

• CaDMAC cannot eliminate capture completely
• Happens because CaDMAC cannot choose routes
• Avoiding capture-prone links ? A routing problem

A
B
X
Y
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• Routing using Beamforming Antennas
• Incorporating capture-awareness

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Motivating Capture-Aware Routing

• Find a route from S to D, given A?B exists
• Options are SXYD, SXZG

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Z
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D
A
A
B
B
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X
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Y
S
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No Capture
Capture
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Measuring Route Cost

• Sum capture costs of all beams on the route
• Capture cost of a Beam j
• how much unproductive traffic incident on Beam j
• Routes hop count
• Cost of participation
• How many intermediate nodes participate in cross
  traffic

X
S
D
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Protocol Design

• Source routing protocol (like DSR)
• Intermediate node X updates route cost from S - X
• Destination chooses route with least cost
  (Uroute)
• Routing protocol shown to be loop-free

C1
USX
X
C2
C5
S
D
C3
USD USX C2 C5 PD 1
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Unified Routing Metric

• Uroute Weighted Combination of
• 1. Capture cost (K)
• 2. Participation cost (P)
• 3. Hop count (H)
• Weights chosen based on sensitivity analysis

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CaRP Vs DSR
2
1
3
4
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CaRP Vs DSR
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CaRP Vs DSR
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CaRP Vs DSR
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CaRP Vs DSR
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CaRP Vs DSR
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CaRP Vs DSR
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CaRP Vs DSR
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CaRP Vs DSR
DSR
CaRP
CaRP prefers a traffic-free direction Squeezes
in more traffic in given area
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Performance of CaDMAC
CaDMAC
DMAC
Aggregate Throughput (Mbps)
CMAC
802.11
CBR Traffic (Mbps)
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Throughput with CaRP
CaRP CaDMAC
Random Topologies
Aggregate Throughput (Mbps)
DSR CaDMAC
DSR 802.11
Topology Number
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Outline / Contribution

• Antenna Systems ? A closer look
• New challenges with beamforming antennas
• Design of MAC and Routing protocols
• MMAC, ToneDMAC, CaDMAC
• DDSR, CaRP
• Cross-Layer protocols Anycasting
• Improved understanding of theoretical capacity
• Experiment with prototype testbed

75
Testbed Prototype VTC 05, Mobihoc 05

• Network of 6 laptops using ESPAR antennas
• ESPAR attached to external antenna port
• Beams controlled from higher layer via USB
• Validated basic operations and tradeoffs
• Neighbor discovery
• Observed multipath
• 60 degrees beamwidth useful
• Basic link state routing
• Improves route stability
• Higher throughput, less delay

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Summary

• Future Dense wireless networks
• Better interference management necessary
• Typical approach Omni antennas
• Inefficient energy management
• PHY layer research needs be exploited

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Omnidirectional Antennas
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Summary

• Our focus Exploiting antenna capabilities
• Existing protocols not sufficient
• Our work
• Identified several new challenges
• Lot of ongoing research toward these challenges
• Designed MAC, Network layer protocols
• Theoretical capacity analysis
• Prototype implementation

Our vision
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Beamforming
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Other Work

• Sensor Networks
• Reliable broadcast submitted
• Exploiting mobility StoDis 05
• K-Coverage problems
• Location management in mobile networks
• Distributed algorithms IPDPS, Mobihoc
• Scheduling protocols for 802.11n
• Combination of CSMA TDMA schemes WTS 04

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Future Work

• Next generation radios (software, cognitive)
• PHY layer not be sufficient to harness
  flexibility
• Example
• When should a radio toggle between TDMA and CSMA
  ?
• Dynamic channel access needs coordination
• Higher layer protocols necessary for decisions

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Future Work

• Exploiting Diversity Opportunistically
• Especially in the context of improving
  reliability
• Link diversity
• Route diversity
• Antenna diversity
• Channel diversity
• My previous work on Anycasting a first step
• I intend to continue in this direction

A
D
B
S
C
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Future Work

• Sensor Networks

Very complex Works 100
Sensor applications Need to operate here
Solution Complexity
Very simple Works 80
Strong guarantees
Weak guarantees
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Future Work

• Experimental Testbeds and Prototypes
• Evaluate protocols in real conditions
• Mesh Networks
• Sensor Networks
• RFID Networks

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• Thank You
• Acknowledgments
• Prof. Nitin Vaidya (advisor)
• Members of my research group
• Collaborators
• Xue Yang (Intel)
• Ram Ramanathan (BBN)
• Tetsuro Ueda (ATR Labs, Japan)
• Steve Emeott (Motorola Labs)

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IEEE 802.11 with Omni Antenna
M
Y
S
D
X
K
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Enhancing MAC Mobicom02

• MMAC
• Transmit multi-hop RTS to far-away receiver
• Synchronize with receiver using CTS (rendezvous)
• Communicate data over long links

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Routing with Higher Range PWC03 Best Paper

• Directional routes offer
• Better connectivity, fewer-hop routes
• However, broadcast difficult
• Sweeping necessary to emulate broadcast
• Evaluate tradeoffs ? Designed directional DSR

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ToneDMACs Impact
Backoff Counter for DMAC flows
Backoff Values
Backoff Counter for ToneDMAC flows

• Another possible improvement

time
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2-hop flow
IEEE 802.11
Deafness
DMAC
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Neighbor Discovery

• Non LOS and multipath important factors
• However, wide beamwidth (60 degrees) ? reasonable
  envelope

Anechoic Chamber
Office Corridor
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Route Reliability

• Routes discovered using sweeping DO links
• Data Communication using DD links
• Improved SINR improves robustness against fading

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Optimal Carrier Sense Threshold

• When sidelobe abstracted to sphere with gain Gs

Provided, optimal CS threshold is above the Rx
sensitivity threshold i.e., min CS_calculate,
RxSensitivity
Mainlobe Gd
T
Sidelobe Gs
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Commercial Antennas

• Paratek (DRWin scanning smart antennas)
• Beamforming in the RF domain (instead of digital)
• Multiple simultaneous beams possible, each
  steerable
• http//www.mobileinfo.com/news_2002/issue08/Parate
  k_Antenna.htm
• Motia Inc. (Javelin appliqué to 802.11 cards)
• Blind beamforming in RF domain (lt 2us, within
  pilot)
• CalAmps (DirectedAP offers digital beamforming)
• Uses RASTER beamforming technology
• http//www.calamp.com/pro_802_directedap.html

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Commercial Antennas

• Belkin (Pre-N smart antenna router Airgo tech.)
• Uses 3 antenna elements for adaptive beamforming
• http//www.techonline.com/community/tech_group/377
  14
• Tantivy Communications (switching lt 100 nanosec)
• http//www.prism.gatech.edu/gtg139k/papers/11-03-
  025r0-WNG-benefitsofSmartAntennasin802.11Networks.
  pdf

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New Hidden Terminal Problem II

• While node pairs communicate
• X misses Ds CTS to S ? No DNAV toward D

Y
S
Data
Data
D
X
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New Hidden Terminal Problem II

• While node pairs communicate
• X misses Ds CTS to S ? No DNAV toward D
• X may later initiate RTS toward D, causing
  collision

Collision
Y
S
Data
D
RTS
X
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Abstract Antenna Model

• N conical beams
• Any combination of beams can be turned on
• Capable of detecting beam-of-arrival for received
  packet

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Wireless Multihop Networks
Sensors
RFID Readers
RFID
RFID
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Wireless Multihop Networks
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Wireless Multihop Networks
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Wireless Multihop Networks
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Protocol Design

• Numerous challenges
• Connectivity (nodes can be mobile)
• Capacity (increasing demand)
• Reliability (channels fluctuate)
• Security
• QoS
• Many protocols designed
• One commonality among most protocols

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IEEE 802.11 with Omni Antenna
CTS Clear To Send
RTS Request To Send
M
Y
S
RTS
D
CTS
X
K
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Testbed Prototype VTC 05, Mobihoc 05 Poster

• Network of 6 laptops using ESPAR antennas
• ESPAR attached to external antenna port
• Beams controlled from higher layer via USB

106
Neighbor Discovery

• Non LOS and multipath important factors
• However, 60 degree beamwidth useful

Anechoic Chamber
Office Corridor
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Route Reliability

• Routes discovered using sweeping DO links
• Data Communication using DD links
• Improved SINR improves robustness against fading

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Announcements

• Please start with project thoughts
• Come and discuss even if you dont have a topic
• Do you want me to do a forward pointing class in
  which I discuss what we will cover in future
• May help in identifying exciting topics
• Planning to buy sensor motes for class
• See TinyOS tutorial talk to me
• Download simulator (ns2, Qualnet), code your own
• I am arranging Qualnet license for class students