Antenna beamwidth control for improving Signal-to-Noise ratio in wireless sensor networks

In the article it demonstrated that the neighbor-finding procedure in many nowadays wireless sensor networks bears a potential of generating an excessive radio interference. It is shown, based on Stojmenovič Minimum Spanning Tree algorithm, that the situation can be improved even in the worst case scenario of simultaneous transmission from all network nodes, by utilizing the directional antennas, taking the Signal-to-Noise and Interference ratio as a performance measure.

I. Introduction

Scattered wireless sensor networks (WSN) are a simplest example of mesh networks (fig.1). In such networks, however, there exists the same problems associated with creating topology as with broadband networks. For this reason the solution to the procedure of establishing a topology satisfying the reliability criterion, can be demonstrated with the use of any mesh network.