Multi-sector antenna performance in dense wireless networks

Abstract

Sectorized antennas provide an attractive solution to increase wireless network capacity through higher spatial reuse. Despite their increasing popularity, the real-world performance characteristics of such antennas in dense wireless mesh networks are not well understood. In this demo, we demonstrate our multi-sector antenna prototypes and their performance through video streaming over an indoor wireless network in the presence of interfering nodes. We use our graphical tool to vary the sender, receiver, and interferer antenna configurations and the resulting performance is directly visible in the video quality displayed at the receiver.

An overview of using directional antennas in wireless networks

“…But not all studies use the less accurate analytical models. Instead, many real directional systems (both indoor and outdoor DAWNs) either make decisions on the basis of measurements, such as Increasing Indoor Wireless Capacity Using Directional Antennas (DIRC) [32,33], multi-directional-antenna systems (MiDAS) [34], indoor switched beams [35], multi-sector antenna systems [36], and Wi-Fi directional access points (APs) [37],…”

“…Many of the current studies (including most of current outdoor systems and some indoor systems [32,33,36]) have a common assumption that the nodes are densely distributed and the traffic is also in saturation (i.e., each node always has packets to send). In these dense networks, the collision probability of packets is quite high and many complicated schemes are proposed to mitigate the collisions (i.e., the hidden terminal problem and the deafness problem).…”

“…Table VII compares several typical indoor directional systems including DIRC [32], Speed [33], and MiDAS [34]. Note that there are other studies [35][36][37] focused on measurements of using directional antennas in indoor environments whereas there is no system design proposed in these studies. Thus, we do not list the measurements studies in Table VII.…”