A New Architecture of Wireless Mesh Networks Based IEEE 802.11s Directional Antennas

International audienceThis paper tackle the problem of coverage in IEEE 802.11 in mesh mode. Instead of omnidirectional coverage, we propose to use directional coverage that can increase the distance between the nodes. The use of directional antenna have two main advantages. The first is to increase the performance of QoS of considered services. The second is that using directional antenna allows to improve the spatial reuse of the wireless channel, which allows nodes to communicate simultaneously without interference, and potentially establish links between nodes far away from each other, and the number of routing hops can be fewer than that of omnidirectional antennas. We also propose an new amendment to reduce the routing overhead related to the use of multiple interfaces. We have evaluated the performance of the proposed architecture and we show with numerical results that the use of directional coverage outperform the omnidirectional coverage