Directional antennas are expected to provide significant improvements over omni-directional antennas in wireless ad hoc networks. Directional MAC protocols, however, introduce new kinds of problems arising from directivity. One major problem is deafness, caused by a lack of state information from neighbor nodes (i.e., idle or busy). This paper proposes DMAC/DA (Directional MAC with Deafness Avoidance) to overcome the deafness problem. In DMAC/DA, WTS (Wait To Send) frames are transmitted by the transmitter and the receiver after the successful exchange of directional RTS (Request To Send) and CTS (Clear To Send) to notify the on-going communication to potential transmitters that may experience deafness. Furthermore, DMAC/DA is enhanced by the next packet notification to distinguish transmitters from neighbors. We evaluate our protocol through extensive simulation study with different values of parameters such as the number of flows, data size and beamwidth. The experimental results show that DMAC/DA outperforms existing directional MAC protocols, such as DMAC (Directional MAC) and MDA (MAC protocol for Directional Antennas), in terms of throughput, RTS failure ratio, and control overhead.

Recently, several MAC protocols using directional antennas, typically referred to as directional MAC protocols, have been proposed for wireless ad hoc networks. However, the MAC protocols in the previous studies were evaluated using simulation with ideal antenna forms. When using practical antenna beam forms, side lobes and back lobes exist which may cause new problems. In this paper, we evaluate the performance of the directional MAC protocol in the previous studies with practical antenna beam forms. In addition, we propose a directional MAC protocol that assumes practical antenna beam forms. The proposed MAC protocol mitigates data collisions due to the effects of minor lobes by the following two schemes. First, the nodes rotate directional receiving antenna beams in an idle state. Second, nodes transmit NAV (Network Allocation Vector) request frames to avoid collisions from neighboring nodes. By controlling the transmitting power, our protocol allows nodes to communicate with nodes beyond the omni-directional transmission range. The simulation results show that the proposed directional MAC protocol improves throughput performance compared to existing directional MAC protocol when using practical antenna beam forms.

Recently, several MAC protocols using directional antennas, typically referred to as directional MAC protocols, have been proposed for wireless ad hoc networks. Although directional transmissions are expected to provide significant improvements, directional MAC protocols introduce new kinds of problems. One such problem is deafness. Deafness is caused when a transmitter repeatedly attempts to communicate with its intended receiver, but it fails because the receiver has its beam pointed towards a direction away from the transmitter. This paper proposes RI-DMAC (Receiver-Initiated Directional MAC) to address the issue of deafness in directional MAC protocols. RI-DMAC is a combination of sender-initiated and receiver-initiated operations. The sender-initiated mode is the default mode and the receiverinitiated mode is triggered when the transmitter experiences deafness. In RI-DMAC, each node maintains a polling table and polls a potential deafness node using the RTR (Ready To Receive) frame after the completion of every dialog. The experimental results show that RI-DMAC improves throughput and fairness performance compared to existing directional MAC protocols.

Smart antennas are expected to enhance scalability in ad hoc networks. This paper describes the evaluations of three directional MAC protocols, DMAC, MMAC, and SWAMP, as well as the IEEE 802.11 DCF omni-directional protocol in a multi-hop transmission environment. These evaluations address the problem that performance strongly depends on the route topology between the source and destination, referred to as the directional hidden terminal problem. After analyzing this problem, we propose three MAC level solutions. The MAC solutions are NAV indicators, i.e. HCTS, BRTS, and RCTS, which indicate on-going communications to a directional hidden terminal to set NAV. Based on simulated results, we show that all the proposed MAC solutions could improve the throughput performance

In most of the previous research on wireless ad hoc networks, omni-directional antennas are usually used. Smart antennas, however, may offer some benefits, i.e., enhancement of spatial reuse of the wireless channel and extension of the transmission range. This paper proposes a MAC protocol called SWAMP for ad hoc networks using smart antennas based on IEEE 802.11 DCF. SWAMP consists of dual access mode which takes advantage of the two benefits. Simulation studies show SWAMP has high throughput, low end-to-end delay and low overhead compared to the IEEE 802.11, DMAC and MMAC.

Omni-directional antennas are usually used in most of the previous researches on wireless ad hoc networks. Smart antennas, however, may offer some benefits compared with them, i.e., enhancement of spatial reuse of the wireless channel and extension of the transmission range. We have proposed a MAC protocol called SWAMP, which consists of two access modes and uses four beamform patterns effectively, one mode mainly designed for spatial reuse of the wireless channel and the other mode mainly for extension of the communication area. This paper evaluates SWAMP through a random topology model with mobility and a grid topology model. The results show the protocol offers an improvement compared to the IEEE 802.11 DCF in terms of success ratio, throughput, delay and number of simultaneous communications.

The purpose of this research is to realize a small robot which can negotiate pipes whose diameter varies widely during the robot's course. A new in-pipe locomotion mechanism named "snaking drive" is proposed in this paper and its potential and fundamental characteristics are shown with experimental data of the prototype model. First, in the sections 2 to 5, the basic traveling characteristics of the snaking drive mechanism are discussed: a theoretical formula of the fundamental characteristics and control algorithm are derived, the motions of the robot are simulated on a PC, and the prototype model was designed, developed, and tested. Next, in the sections 6 and 7, additional control algorithms for the front link are derived. They are necessary for steering at T-branches and L-bends of pipes, and also for camera view stabilization. Their performances are also shown by software simulation and experiments. The prototype robots moved in pipes whose diameter varies between 55 mm to 331 mm with the maximum speed of 22 mm/s. The paper also shows that the prototype negotiates T-branches and L-bends of pipes with inspection capability through a camera mounted on the robot.