Performance of Directional MAC Protocols in Ad Hoc Networks with Position Estimation Errors

摘要

Several recently proposed directional MAC protocols for mobile ad hoc networks incorporate the positions of the destination stations, as well as the interfering ones, in the beamforming process at each mobile station. Assum ing perfect node position estimation, these protocols have shown to provide a significant throughput improvement rel ative to the existing omni-directional protocols. When per fect node position information is available, it was noticed that increasing the number of antenna elements can play an important role in improving the total system throughput for these directional MAC protocols. We investigate the effect of inaccurate node position estimation on the throughput of these protocols over both Gaussian and Ricean fading channels. Our results show that, in contrary to the ideal case, as the position estima tion error increases, the system throughput dramatically de creases with the number of antennas.