BeamStar: a new low-cost data routing protocol for wireless sensor networks

In this paper, we present a base station-assisted, location-aware routing protocol, which we call BeamStar, for wireless sensor networks. We make a major paradigm change by shifting computational intensive and energy consuming routing control overhead from sensor nodes to base stations. In BeamStar, each base station uses a directional antenna with power control. We show that these two capabilities are sufficient for each sensor node to determine its location, and the local location information is sufficient for power-efficient routing. Therefore, sensors are relieved of control and routing burdens, such as maintaining clusters and exchanging control information, yielding substantial energy savings. In addition, each data packet is forwarded in a constrained, loop-free mesh towards the base station, making data delivery robust to sensor failures and transmission errors. The proposed routing scheme is suitable for large-scale, dense sensor networks monitoring rare events.