FFT-DMAC: A Tone Based MAC Protocol with Directional Antennas

Ying Li, Minglu Li, Wei Shu, Min-You Wu

Abstract: This paper presents the FFT (flip-flop tone) DMAC protocol, a tone based MAC protocol using directional antennas to solve the deafness problem, hidden terminal and exposed terminal problems simultaneously. It uses two pairs of flip-flop tones. The first pair of tone is sent omni-directionally to reach every neighboring node to announce the start and the end of communication, and therefore to avoid the deafness problem. The second pair of tone is sent directionally towards the sender. It is used to solve the hidden terminal problem as well as the exposed terminal problem. Evaluation shows that FFT-DMAC can achieve better performance compared to the 802.11 and ToneDMAC protocol.