Exploiting Multi-Beam Antennas for End-to-End Delay Reduction in Ad Hoc Networks

A Multi-Beam Antenna (MBA) can be defined as a set of directional radio transceivers. These transceivers are facing different directions to prevent signal interference with each other. MBA nodes have two main characteristics: the Multi-Packet Transmission (MPT) capability and the Multi-Packet Reception (MPR) capability whereby a node can transmit/receive multiple packets at the same time. In this paper, we provide an analysis of how this MPT/MPR capability can be used to reduce the end-to-end delay for delivered packets in ad hoc networks. Taking beam considerations (determination of the beam in which neighbors are located) into account, we formulate the delay reduction issue as an optimization problem that we solve. Our results show that to maximally exploit the full potential of MBAs for delay reduction, the scheduling of links has to promote the formation of star nodes and keep the formation of bridges to a minimum; all of which leads to the selection of routes that very often are not the shortest. In fact, using only the shortest routes has a negative impact on the delay. However, the optimal link scheduling comes at the expense of a higher overhead in terms of the total number of packet transmissions. Furthermore, the beamwidth has a direct and significant impact on the end-to-end delay and the computation time.