Computer Science Department Networking Seminar
08-12-2002
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
Computer Science 111
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.
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).