Symmetric connectivity in Wireless Sensor Networks with directional antennas

Abstract

In this paper, we study the Antenna Orientation (AO) problem concerning symmetric connectivity in Directional Wireless Sensor Networks. We are given a set of nodes each of which is equipped with one directional antenna with beam-width θ = 2π/3 and is initially assigned a transmission range 1 that yields a connected unit disk graph spanning all nodes. The objective of the problem is to compute an orientation of the antennas and to find a minimum transmission power range r = O(1) such that the induced symmetric communication graph is connected. We propose an algorithm that orients the antennas to yield a symmetric connected graph where the transmission power range is bounded by 6 which is currently the best result for this problem. We also study the performance of our algorithm through simulation.