EFFICIENT MAC PROTOCOL FOR WIRELESS SENSOR NODES TO LESSEN HIDDEN AND DEAF NODE PROBLEM

A directional antenna provides vital advantages over an omnidirectional antenna in wireless networks; however, the deaf, hidden, and exposed nodes problem is more severe with directional antenna. In this paper we propose MAC protocol (DMAC) to fight the problems caused by directional-antenna usage. We use a heterogeneous antenna that can transmit/receive signals in both a directional and omnidirectional mode. We presented a new control packet called “Communication Information Packet” (CIP) is designed to overwhelm the directional-antenna issues. We provide a discrete-time Markov chain that is used to analyze the saturation throughput of our proposed DMAC protocol, and an OPNET simulation to validate the numerical results.