PUB - Publikationen an der Universität Bielefeld

The use of directional communication can result in higher performance of ad hoc networks in terms of throughput and delay. To exploit these advantages, we propose a system architecture that applies k air interfaces on each node. Each interface is equipped with a directional antenna. However, the energy consumption of such a system would be too high intuitionally. Power management is required that switches off the air interfaces if they are not needed. Hence, we design a detailed energy model for the system and a MAC protocol based on CSMA/CA with extensions for parallel directional communication, radiation power control and air interface power management. We verify and evaluate our implementation in a simulation environment. Our results show that the proposed system can achieve an energy efficiency comparable to a single antenna system while increasing the throughput and time efficiency of the resulting ad hoc network by a factor of 2-3.