A hybrid MAC for long-distance mesh network with multi-beam antennas

Abstract

In recent years, with the development of multi-beam smart antennas (MBSA), directional mesh networks is becoming more and more popular. With the popularity of UAVs and environment surveillance applications, airborne networks (ANs) have become important platforms for wireless transmissions in the sky. In this work we propose a hybrid MAC scheme for a hierarchical airborne network, which consists of high-speed, long-link, multi-beam aircraft nodes (in the higher level) and short-distance, high-density UAVs (in the lower level). Simulation results show that compared to existing 802.11 MAC schemes, our MAC has better performance in terms of network throughput and packet delay.