Implementation of a Multi-Beam MAC Protocol for Multi-Hop Wireless Networks in Riverbed Modeler

TL;DR

This paper presents a detailed framework for implementing a multi-beam MAC protocol in multi-hop wireless networks within the Riverbed Modeler simulation environment, addressing challenges of directional communication.

Contribution

It introduces a comprehensive implementation methodology for multi-beam MAC in Riverbed Modeler, enabling realistic simulation of directional antennas and protocols.

Findings

Framework facilitates multi-beam MAC implementation in Riverbed Modeler.

Detailed procedures for antenna, node, and protocol modules are provided.

Supports research and development of directional wireless network protocols.

Abstract

Recent advances in antenna technology have made the design of multi-beam antennas (MBA) feasible. Compared to an omni-directional or a single beam directional antenna, an MBA equipped node can achieve a throughput of up to m times, by simultaneously communicating on its m non-interfering beams. As a result, a few multi-beam directional medium access control (MAC) schemes have been proposed in the literature recently, which are implemented mostly on the in-house simulation setups in Matlab or C/C++. These implementations make many assumptions to simplify their design, without a thorough implementation of other network layers. However, the implementation of a multi-beam MAC scheme on the well-known discrete event network simulator platforms (such as the Riverbed Modeler, NS3, QualNet) is challenging as it requires extensive changes and additions to various source code modules. In fact, the network protocols in these simulator packages have been mainly designed for omni-directional communication, and very few implementations of directional MAC and other network protocols exist in the literature. This paper presents a framework to implement a multi-beam directional MAC scheme in multi-hop wireless networks, by using the Wireless Suite of Riverbed Modeler. The detailed implementation procedures are described for multi-beam antenna module, multi-beam node model, concurrent packet transmission and reception, scheduling, collision avoidance, retransmission, and local node synchronization. These MAC modules and methodology can be very helpful to the researchers and developers for implementing the single-beam as well as multi-beam directional MAC and routing protocols in Riverbed Modeler.