Design and Performance Analysis of Segmented Wireless Sensor Networks

This article presents the design and a theoretical performance analysis of a segmented wireless sensor network whose sink node is equipped with a switched-beam smart antenna. We compare the performance of the proposed segmented system against that of a conventional wireless sensor network (WSN) where all the nodes contend to access the medium in order to identify the system's conditions where the use of a smart antenna is justified. Our results show that the segmented network outperforms the WSN by reducing the cluster formation time in up to 25% with similar energy savings.