Networking Colloquium Series - Summer
2002
Utilizing Directional Antennas in Ad Hoc Networks
Dr.
Nitin H. Vaidya
Department of Electrical and
Computer Engineering
University of Illinois at
Urbana-Champaign
Monday
August 12,
2002
3:00PM - 4:00PM
ABSTRACT
Previous research in wireless ad hoc networks typically
assumes the use of omnidirectional antennas at all nodes.
With omnidirectional antennas, while two nodes are
communicating using a given channel, MAC protocols such
as IEEE 802.11 require all other nodes in the vicinity
to stay silent. With directional antennas, two pairs of
nodes located in each other's vicinity may potentially
communicate simultaneously, depending on the directions
of transmission. This can increase spatial reuse of the
wireless channel. In addition, the higher gain of
directional antennas allows a node to communicate with
other nodes located far away, implying that messages
could be delivered to the destination in fewer hops. In
this seminar, we will discuss impact of directional
antennas on MAC and routing protocols. We will also
discuss MAC and routing protocols that attempt to
exploit directional antennas to improve performance.
Joint work with: Romit Roy Choudhury (UIUC), Xue Yang
(UIUC), Ram Ramanathan (BBN)
About the speaker:
Nitin Vaidya received Ph.D. from the University of
Massachusetts at Amherst. He is presently an Associate
Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC). He has
held visiting positions at Microsoft Research, Sun
Microsystems and the Indian Institute of Technology-
Bombay. Prior to joining UIUC, he served as an Associate
Professor of Computer Science at the Texas A&M
University. His current research is in the areas of
wireless networking and mobile computing. In particular,
he has performed research on routing and medium access
control protocols for wireless ad hoc networks,
distributed algorithms on ad hoc networks, performance
of TCP over wireless networks, and security in wireless
networks. His research has been funded by various
agencies, including the National Science Foundation,
DARPA, BBN Technologies, Microsoft Research and Sun
Microsystems. Nitin Vaidya is a recipient of a CAREER
award from the National Science Foundation. Nitin has
served on the program committees of several conferences
and workshops, and served as the General Chair for the
2001 ACM Symposium on Mobile Ad Hoc Networking and
Computing (MobiHoc). He serves on the editorial boards of
IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing and IEEE/ACM
Transactions on Networking. He is a senior member of IEEE
Computer Society and a member of the ACM. For more
information, please visit
http://www.crhc.uiuc.edu/~nhc.
Faculty and students wishing to speak privately
with Dr. Vaidya should contact Dongyan Xu at dxu@cs.purdue.edu
or 494-6182.
Direct your comments and suggestions to
Dongyan Xu (dxu@cs.purdue.edu).