A location routing protocol based on smart antennas for wireless sensor networks

Wireless sensor networks are an emerging technology for environmental monitoring. A typical sensor network is composed of a large number of low-cost, low-power, multi-functional miniature sensor devices (nodes) equipped with a radio transceiver and a set of transducers utilized to acquire information about the surrounding environment.;Due to the inherent characteristics and restrictions of sensor nodes, routing in WSNs is very challenging. The task of finding and maintaining routes is nontrivial since energy restrictions and sudden changes in node status (e.g. failure) cause frequent and unpredictable topological changes.;This work introduces a novel location routing protocol that uses smart antennas to estimate nodes positions into the network and to deliver information basing routing decisions on neighbour's status connection and relative position, named LBRA.;The main purpose of LBRA is to eliminate network control overhead as much as possible. To achieve this goal, the algorithm employs local position for route decision, implements a novel mechanism to collect the location information and involves only route participants in the synchronization of location information. In addition, the protocol uses node battery information to make power aware routing decisions.;One of the most important constraints of sensor nodes is the low power consumption requirement since they carry limited, generally irreplaceable, batteries. In addition, they are also characterized by scarce processing speed, storage capacity and communication bandwidth, thus requiring careful resource management.;LBRA is an enhanced version of the ZigBee routing, which is the current standard for reliable, cost-effective and low power wireless networking, and like the latter is prototyped from AODV. In order to assess to what extent LBRA truly represents an improvement with respect to the ZigBee routing, a series of simulations were designed with the help of the Network Simulator (ns). Basically, both protocols were implemented in the simulator and its performance was compared in a variety of traffic load, network size and mobility conditions.;The experiment results showed that LBRA succeed in reducing the control overhead and the routing load, improving the packet delivery rate for both static and mobile networks. Additionally, network power depletion is more balanced, since routing decisions are made depending on nodes' battery level.