Medium Access Control Protocol for Wireless Sensor Networks in Harsh Environments with Directional Antennas
A. Chau, John Frederick Dawson, Paul Mitchell, Tian Hong Loh · 2018
In this paper, we consider the application of directional antennas to the hub node of a wireless sensor network (WSN), whilst retaining an omni-directional antenna on each sensor node, thus enhancing link performance without increasing the cost, complexity or energy consumption of the sensor nodes. We propose a simple medium access control (MAC) protocol for the hub node, based on the ALOHA protocol but designed to support multiple antennas on the hub, whilst the sensors retain the original ALOHA protocol. The analysis and simulation results show a 217% increase in throughput. Further possibilities of this architecture include increased range and/or the reduced sensor power consumption.