Mobile Ad-hoc Network, also known as MANET, is evolving with communication and networking technologies. MANET has a wide varity of applications in domestic and military area. Unmanned Aerial Vehicles, UAVs, are also one of the popular applications of MANET. Communication in MANET is a challenge as it does not use any centralized control system. Furthermore, this communication should happen at a higher data rate. Controlling the overhead for the communication is another issue when dealing with MANET. Directional antenna has many merits, such as lower interference, better spatial reuse, and longer transmission range which improves network capacity. Directional antennas enable numerous emerging outdoor and indoor applications, which breed a new research area, directional MANET. Although directional MANET utilizes benefits of directional antennas, it has challenges such as discovery of new neighbors and maintenance of these discovered links to route data. One of the solutions to address these challenges is Neighbor Discovery (ND). Nodes discover each other while they are in range, store information provided by other node and use this information when they need to transfer data or route data coming from another node. The goal of this research is to develop a testbed using Software Defined Radio (SDR) and directional antennas to shape a directional MANET and implement Neighbor Discovery algorithm on it. Upon completion of this thesis project, a fully operational system implemented with ND algorithm is presented.
