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For some time, directional antennas have been considered to solve connectivity and interference issues in wireless networks. Several scenarios have been presented and often the conclusions drawn are positive, showing increase in capacity. However, to date there has been no effort to assess a holistic picture of the benefit/cost tradeoff and previous work mainly concerns either link scheduling or antenna placement but not the two combined. Such consideration will become increasingly important in the near future with the advent of heterogeneous networks and other possible combinations of mesh and public access networks.

In order to better understand the full implications and potential of using directional antennas in such systems, we present a model for determining the maximized benefit/cost tradeoff using a combination of directional and omnidirectional antennas in wireless multihop backbones. We study …