Exploiting selection diversity and recovering spectrum loss in Wireless Sensor Networks with directional antennas

This paper proposes a distributed relay selection and successive relaying scheme for Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) with directional antennas. Since the working life of WSN is usually affected by the battery life of its nodes, the reduction of the nodes´ working time without the sacrifice of communication quality is of significant interest. The proposed scheme makes explore the potential of the large number of nodes within WSNs via distributed relay selection and utilizes a successive relaying protocol to recover the 50% spectrum loss due to relaying. It can thus save energy and time for the source, relay and destination nodes for transmitting and receiving. The performances of the proposed scheme are evaluated by both theoretical analysis and numerical experiments. Results show that the proposed scheme can achieve high average data rate and diversity gain, and provides a feasible solution to enhance the communication ability of WSNs with directional antennas.