A Location Prediction Algorithm for Mobile Communications Using Directional Antennas

• Main Authors: Xiaofeng Lu, Pietro Lio, Pan Hui, Haifei Jin
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: SAGE Publishing 2013-11-01
• Series: International Journal of Distributed Sensor Networks
• Online Access: https://doi.org/10.1155/2013/418606

A directional communication scheme, TRAC, is proposed in this paper to deal with issues in mobile directional communications. Directional communication can bring benefits in terms of spatial reuse, power consumption, and security. Using direction antennas implies that the transmitters must know the direction or location of the receiver. It is necessary to predict the receiver's location to keep the transmitter's antenna pointing in the right direction if nodes travel always. TRAC is composed of the location prediction and antenna adjustment. It predicts a possible circular region where the moving receiver may enter into in the near future. The transmitter points its antenna at the predicted circular region and adjusts the beam-width of its directional antenna to cover the predicted region. The authors validated the TRAC algorithm on some vehicles traces. The validation indicated that the algorithm efficiency of TRAC is larger than 96%. TRAC can be employed in mobile communications without nodes' history movement traces.