Paper Info
Title
Directional Transmissions and Receptions for High-throughput Bulk Forwarding in Wireless Sensor Networks
Abstract
We present DPT: a wireless sensor network protocol for bulk traffic that uniquely leverages electronically switchable directional (ESD) antennas. Bulk traffic is found in several scenarios and supporting protocols based on standard antenna technology abound. ESD antennas may improve performance in these scenarios; for example, by reducing channel contention as the antenna can steer the radiated energy only towards the intended receivers, and by extending the communication range at no additional energy cost. The corresponding protocol support, however, is largely missing. DPT addresses precisely this issue. First, while the network is quiescent, we collect link metrics across all possible antenna configurations. We use this information to formulate a constraint satisfaction problem (CSP) that allows us to find two multi-hop disjoint paths connecting source and sink, along with the corresponding antenna configurations. Domain-specific heuristics we conceive ameliorate the processing demands in solving the CSP, improving scalability. Second, the routing configuration we obtain is injected back into the network. During the actual bulk transfer, the source funnels data through the two paths by quickly alternating between them. Packet forwarding occurs deterministically at every hop. This allows the source to implicitly \"clock\" the entire pipeline, sparing the need of proactively synchronizing the transmissions across the two paths. Our results, obtained in a real testbed using 802.15.4-compliant radios and custom ESD antennas we built, indicate that DPT approaches the maximum throughput supported by the link layer, peaking at 214 kbit/s in the settings we test.
Year
DOI
Venue
2015
10.1145/2809695.2809720
Conference On Embedded Networked Sensor Systems
Keywords
DocType
Citations 
Directional antennas,Bulk data transmissions,Wireless sensor networks,Electronically controlled antennas
Conference
7
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.50
31
4
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Ambuj Varshney18212.10
Luca Mottola21797104.72
Mats Carlsson397579.24
Thiemo Voigt43458250.13