A directional multicasting-based architecture for wireless sensor networks

Energy scarcity, limited transmission range and interference are the primary challenges that need to be considered judiciously for Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs). Directional data transmission can improve the network capacity as well as the network lifetime by facilitating spatial multiplexing and range extension, which inherently yields interference reduction, as the result of concurrent data transmissions. Another promising method of achieving energy conservation is the transmission power control. Transmission power control also contributes to the mitigation of interference thereby promotes throughput by means of rendering multiple hosts to communicate in the same directionality simultaneously without impairing each other's transmissions. Harnessing the antenna directionality with dynamic power control gives the opportunity to WSNs to consume their scarce energy resources in a more efficient manner. In this article, we propose an energy efficient multi-cast routing-based architecture (MRBA). This architecture mainly bases on the idea of multi-cast routing methodology with hop-by-hop data fragmentation and power-controlled directional transmission. Multiple next-hop utilization during packet transmission together with directional relaying of the sub-packets provide interference reduction together with fair data transfer load sharing among the nodes. Simulation results show that significant improvements can be achieved in terms of energy saving and end-to-end delay enhancement with respect to omnidirectional architectures.