Energy efficient communications solutions for nomadic nodes within a wireless sensor networks

Presently, wireless sensor networks most challenging applications are related to mobile sinks or even nodes, monitoring and intervening in critical areas. To this end, proper communications protocols design plays a crucial role in fulfilling user requirements. In the following, the benefits of adopting directive antennas, both in terms of energy saving and targets tracking are presented by integrating this feature into a novel MAC protocol (MD-STAR). Simulation results are also deeply provided, underlining higher performance of MD-STAR with respect to existing solutions, for different directive main lobe width and node density values.