Directional anycast routing in wireless sensor and actor networks

Current routing approaches in wireless sensor and actor networks (WSANs) display lack of unification for different traffic patterns because they are designed separately for sensor-actor and actor-actor communications. In this paper, we explore the capabilities and compounding advantages of directional antennas and actors and propose a unified routing protocol supporting arbitrary traffic in WSANs. The proposed routing protocol uses actors as the main routing anchors as much as possible because they have enough energy and computing power and use directional anycast routing to reduce the total energy consumption of the overall network. The performance of this routing protocol is compared with conventional ones by simulation.