Enhancing the performance of wireless sensor networks with MIMO communications

Wireless sensor networks are an enabling technology for many future surveillance-oriented applications. Before a practical wireless sensor network is realized, however, significant challenges must be overcome. Chief among the obstacles to netted sensors is providing low power, robust communications between sensor nodes. Multiple input, multiple output (MIMO) communication promises performance enhancements over conventional single input, single output (SISO) technology for the same radiated power. If leveraged in a sensor network, MIMO may be able to provide significant network performance improvements in power consumption, latency, and network robustness. The application of MIMO to wireless sensor networks was explored in J. Burdin et al. (2005) with regard to probability of cohesion and largest cluster sizes. This paper investigates the benefit of MIMO implementations in multihop wireless sensor networks in terms of the mean path length. We find that MIMO provides improvement to wireless sensor networks, particularly those that have low to midrange node densities