Ant Based Adaptive Directional Monitoring MAC Protocol Using Smart Antennas in MANET

1.1. MANET

Mobile Ad Hoc network (MANET) is a multi-hop mobile wireless network. A collection of mobile nodes is called mobile ad hoc networks that dynamically formed a network without the use of any pre-existing network infrastructure or centralized administration. Some of them include military battlefield circumstance, disaster relief, and rescue during emergency, teleconferencing, data dissemination services, civilian applications like outdoor meeting, money transfers etc. (Goyal, 2013; Qian et al., 2014).

The following are the issues of MANET:

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  MANET is composed of a number of nodes that can move around. So, the network topology may experience continuous change and cause frequent route breakages and re-routing activity;

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  Energy conserving is a challenge for mobile nodes that are limited battery powered cannot recharge frequently, which means they cannot afford complex and energy intensive computation (Zhai et al., 2006).

1.2. MAC Protocol for Directional Antenna

MAC is a key technology for wireless share media communication. To utilize the directional antenna, a suitable MAC protocol is essential. MAC for directional antenna systems can be classified into two categories: on demand and scheduled (Dai et al., 2013; Jain et al., 2009). The directional hidden terminal problem caused by the difference of gain between directional and omni directional beam patterns. The deafness problem leads to increase the latency and excessive packet drops (Miyaji et la., 2010). The other challenges of MAC protocol include the following:

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  Bandwidth efficiency and overhead;

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  Quality of Support;

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  Synchronization;

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  Error Prone Shared Broadcast Channel;

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  Distributed Nature/ Lack of central Coordination;

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  Mobility of Nodes (Wu and Qiu, 2011; Jawhar and Wu, 2006).