Directional antenna technologies have made significant advancements in the last decade. These advances have opened the door to many exciting new design opportunities for wireless networks to enhance quality of service (QoS), performance, and network capacity. In this book, experts from around the world present the latest research and development in wireless networks with directional antennas. Their contributed chapters provide detailed coverage of the models, algorithms, protocols, and applications of wireless networks with various types of directional antennas operating at different frequency bands.

Wireless Network Performance Enhancement via Directional Antennas: Models, Protocols, and Systems identifies several interesting research problems in this important field, providing an opportunity to learn about solid solutions to these issues. It also looks at a number of practical hardware designs for the deployment of next-generation antennas, as well as efficient network protocols for exploitation of directional communications.

The book is organized into six sections:

• Directional Antennas – covers the hardware design of different types of antennas
• Directional MAC – focuses on the principles of designing medium access control (MAC) protocols for directional networks
• Millimeter Wave – explores different design aspects of millimeter wave (mm-Wave) systems, which operate in higher-frequency bands (such as 60 GHz)
• MIMO – explains how to establish a multiple-input, multiple-output (MIMO) antenna system and describes how it operates in a cognitive radio network
• Advanced Topics – looks at additional topics such as beamforming in cognitive radio networks, multicast algorithm development, network topology management for connectivity, and sensor network lifetime issues
• Applications – illustrates some important applications, such as military networks and airborne networking, that benefit from directional networking designs

With this book, researchers and engineers will be well-equipped to advance the research and development in this important field. If you’re new to this field, you will find this book to be a valuable reference on basic directional networking principles, engineering design, and challenges.