Intelligent Multibeam Transmissions for Mission-Oriented Airborne Networks
Fei Hu, Xin Li, Elizabeth Serena Bentley, Lei Hu, Ke Bao, Sunil Kumar · IEEE Transactions on Aerospace and Electronic Systems · 2018
By using the multibeam smart antennas (MBSAs), the nodes can form a high-throughput wireless mesh network with concurrent packet delivery in multiple directions. In this paper, a novel medium access control (MAC) scheme is designed for multibeam airborne mesh networks. It has the following two features: First, IEEE 802.11-compatible, interference-minimized channel access via a special two-layer MAC architecture, where the upper-layer MAC supports the concurrent multibeam transmission/reception, and the lower-layer MAC takes advantage of MBSAs; second, adjustment of the parameters of the two MAC layers to support different mission priorities in airborne networks, including the allocation of time slots in the upper layer. The simulation results demonstrate the superior performance of our proposed multibeam MAC protocols.