Ad hoc networks are formed of a collection of parties that communicate without need for an underlying infrastructure, and sharing some common medium, typically a radio channel within a specified bandwidth. Ad hoc networks are considered an important technology to improve communication flexibility, yet they suffer from a number of problems, e.g., the harshness of radio communications, and the increased difficulty of effectively access a shared medium.
Among the techniques to improve performance in ad hoc networks, the use of multiple antennas is receiving a lot of interest. At the price of increased signal processing complexity, multiple antennas bring into the picture some advantages, including but not limited to, directive long-range communications, spatial signal rejection, and Multiple-Input-Multiple-Output signaling, thus space-time coding, spatial multiplexing, interference detection and cancellation.
When joining such novel capabilities with existing protocols, the suboptimality of a simple change of the physical (PHY) level becomes apparent. In this talk, I will present a way to efficiently integrate PHY and Medium Access Control (MAC) in order to achieve better performance through cross-layer interactions. The obtained results are interesting and suggest to continue in this direction, extending the same methodology to multi-hop routing.