Efficient Delivery of Information in Sensor Networks Using Smart Antennas

In this work we present a new routing protocol for sensor networks that utilizes smart antennas to propagate information about a sensed event towards a receiving center. Our protocol is suited for those cases where unexpected changes to the environment must be propagated quickly back to the base station without the use of complicated protocols that may deplete the network from its resources. The novelty of our approach lies in the fact that our protocol uses only local information and total absence of coordination between sensors; during a simple initialization phase each node uses the beam that lies towards the direction of the base station to transmit data and the beam lying on the opposite side of the plane to receive data. We provide detailed experimental analysis that demonstrates the feasibility of this approach, the necessity of using smart antennas in sensor networks and the advantages that are presented to communications due to their use. In particular, we demonstrate that sensed data are propagated by activating only the sensors that lie very close to the optimal path between the source of the event and the destination, resulting in low activation of the network’s sensors. Furthermore, our protocol is very easy to implement and more importantly it is scalable as it remains independent of network size.