Smart antenna based broadcasting in wireless ad hoc networks

Smart antennas have the advantage over traditional omnidirectional antennas of being able to orientate radio signals into the concerned directions in either transmission mode or in reception mode. Since the omnidirectional antenna use in broadcasting over the whole network is the source of an excessive redundancy of broadcast packet receptions within each node, we suggest using smart antennas to improve the medium usage in the case of broadcasting. We propose to adapt a current broadcast protocol to smart antenna applications and present two smart antenna broadcast approaches. We also present a comparative performance study between omnidirectional and smart antennas when broadcasting. We show that we can improve battery power utilisation and bandwidth usage with smart antennas.