Cross Layer Design of Protocols for Ad-Hoc Networks Employing Smart Antennas

The provision of spatial diversity by the use of smart antennas has provided a very promising frontier to the wireless network research and development community
towards designing networks capable of supporting very high data rates. In the last decade there has been extensive research activity to incorporate this technology first in cellular and more recently in ad hoc networks. To this end there have been proposed protocols at the MAC sub-layer for supporting the usage of smart antennae in ad hoc networks. However there remain open MAC layer issues that are yet to be resolved completely.
In our lab we are designing new MAC protocols to fully exploit the capabilities of smart antennas. We carry out analysis and extensive simulations to understand the performance of our scheme in terms of its ability to maintain connectivity, the achieved utilization efficiency, and throughput.
For our simulations we have chosen to use Opnet for two reasons:
First it provides the antenna editor which can be used to model directional antennas with high accuracy. This is a very useful tool which for the moment is provided only by Opnet.
Second it provides a detailed modeling of the wireless channel and implementation of the IEEE 802.11 protocol. The last is used extensively by most of the researcher for comparing the performance of the new protocols they have designed.