Flooding speed in wireless multihop networks with randomized beamforming

Abstract

This paper analyzes aspects of message propagation in multihop wireless networks with beamforming antennas. In particular, we focus our intention on the message propagation in the time domain. Our work uses a simulation based implementation of the 802.11 MAC protocol and a simplified version of a previously proposed MAC protocol, called BeamMAC [1]. Both protocols are compared under different network scenarios with several antenna array implementations (including an omnidirectional antenna). Our conclusions confirm the advantages beamforming antennas have over omnidirectional antennas in wireless multihop networks. Reduced hop distances and reduced time for information dissemination speed up flooding of messages. Moreover, we observe the impact network topology parameters have on the overall performance of the message propagation. © IFIP International Federation for Information Processing 2007.