An Energy Efficient Cross Layer Solution Based on Smart Antennas for Wireless Sensor Network Applications

Wireless Sensor Network deployment currently represents an affordable solution to some challenging application areas. This involves a careful system design with particular regard to the communications and control protocols. In the following, the benefits of adopting directive antennas, both in terms of energy saving and targets tracking are presented by integrating this feature into a novel MAC protocol (MD-STAR). Simulation results are also deeply provided, underlining higher performance of MD-STAR with respect to existing solutions, for different directive main lobe width and node density values.