Neighbor discovery with directional antennas in mobile ad-hoc networks

Directional antennas offer great performance improvement for mobile ad hoc networks, but this improvement requires new mechanisms at medium access and networking layer. One of the most important protocols is neighbor discovery aiming at setting up links between nodes and their neighbors. This paper proposes a mathematical framework of a scan-based algorithm (SBA) for neighbor discovery, taking into account the case that more than one node exist in one directional beam. The analysis adopts detailed model for the discovery process and derives expression for the average number of slots required to discover all the neighbor nodes. Numerical results indicate the superiority of the proposed model.