Interference in anisotropic antenna topology controlled ad-hoc and sensor networks

The realm of ad-hoc and sensor networks has been a deeply studied area in recent years: many protocols, simulations, theories, etc. emerged. There is however a gap between the simulated results and the real world implementations, due to mainly two reasons: electromagnetic signal propagation and antenna models. The first of the reasons (propagation) started picking up attention, however antenna studies are not yet integrated in the models for ad-hoc networks. The small-sized nature of the used devices implies small antennas, which have characteristics far from the ideal or ideal-dipole models. This paper demonstrates the contribution of antenna anisotropy to even the simplest ad-hoc networks, those formed by topology control mechanisms, resulting in rather unexpected interference values.