On Designing MAC Protocols for Wireless Networks Using Directional Antennas
IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing
MobiSteer: using steerable beam directional antenna for vehicular network access
Proceedings of the 5th international conference on Mobile systems, applications and services
Introduction to Space-Time Wireless Communications
Introduction to Space-Time Wireless Communications
Experimental characterization of sectorized antennas in dense 802.11 wireless mesh networks
Proceedings of the tenth ACM international symposium on Mobile ad hoc networking and computing
DIRC: increasing indoor wireless capacity using directional antennas
Proceedings of the ACM SIGCOMM 2009 conference on Data communication
On the effectiveness of switched beam antennas in indoor environments
PAM'08 Proceedings of the 9th international conference on Passive and active network measurement
DMesh: Incorporating Practical Directional Antennas in Multichannel Wireless Mesh Networks
IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications
Pushing the envelope of indoor wireless spatial reuse using directional access points and clients
Proceedings of the sixteenth annual international conference on Mobile computing and networking
WiFi-Nano: reclaiming WiFi efficiency through 800 ns slots
MobiCom '11 Proceedings of the 17th annual international conference on Mobile computing and networking
When are directional antennas useful in indoor environments
WiNTECH '11 Proceedings of the 6th ACM international workshop on Wireless network testbeds, experimental evaluation and characterization
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Interference among co-channel users is a fundamental problem in wireless networks, which prevents nearby links from operating concurrently. Directional antennas allow the radiation patterns of wireless transmitters to be shaped to form directed beams. Conventionally, such beams are assumed to improve the spatial reuse (i.e. concurrency) in indoor wireless networks. In this paper, we use experiments in an indoor office setting of Wifi Access points equipped with directional antennas, to study their potential for interference mitigation and spatial reuse. In contrast to conventional wisdom, we observe that the interference mitigation benefits of directional antennas are minimal. On analyzing our experimental traces we observe that directional links do not reduce interference to nearby links due to the lack of signal confinement due to indoor multipath fading. We then use the insights derived from our study to develop an alternative approach that provides better interference reduction in indoor networks compared to directional links.