Medium access and power control protocol for wireless sensor networks with directional antennas

The primary contribution of this paper lies in evaluating the potential benefits of using directional antennas in wireless sensor networks to reduce node power consumption and improve fairness and throughput. The protocol helps improve throughput and reduce energy consumption by maximising spatial reuse and with a strategy to deal with overlap between antenna patterns without any additional complexity at the sensor nodes themselves. The protocol uses packets from the hub to estimate the transmission power required by nodes, to avoid excess energy usage. The protocol is verified using RiverBed Modeler. Simulation results for fairness, throughput and node transmission energy requirement are presented, showing a reduction in average transmission power by a factor of two with respect to the protocol without power control. Good fairness is demonstrated and throughput for a 4-antenna system is 2.17 times that of a single antenna system. The antenna pattern overlap, which is often assumed negligible, is shown to have a significant effect on throughput

Decision-Tree Based Transceiver Selection for Medium Access Control in Wireless Sensor Networks

The primary contribution of this paper lies in evaluating the potential benefits of using decision tree based transceiver selection algorithms for multi-hub wireless sensor networks (WSNs) to improve network performance and stability. The classification algorithm helps improve network throughput and reduce unnecessary transceiver handovers by considering multiple decision factors, without any additional hardware complexity at the sensor nodes. The algorithms allow the nodes to use information included in the reference messages from the transceivers, and the Receiver Signal Strength Indicator (RSSI) as decision factors. This paper demonstrates the effectiveness of decision tree based algorithms (Decision Tree and Random Forest) through simulation, and the results show that this approach can enhance throughput and provide extra stability to the WSN in the scenarios considered, compared to traditional approach using distance or RSSI