Turning Sensor Networks into Distributed Antenna Arrays for Improved Communication Performance

We study the potential of using sensor networks as distributed antenna arrays for improved packet reception performance. In many sensor network applications, nodes can be distinguished according to their roles. Backbone (or ground) nodes establish a core network used to deliver data to a (possibly central) sink, whereas mobile nodes transmit sensor readings to this backbone. In the case of errors, the transmitted information is either lost or must be repeated. Considering very energy constrained nodes, such retransmission is often prohibitive. Making use of the spatial distribution of such a ground network means that macrodiversity can be exploited. By combining received signal samples from multiple ground stations, the chance of successful decoding can be substantially improved. Using a specific wildlife monitoring application, we demonstrate the advantages of this concept. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work to make use of a sensor network as a distributed antenna array, which offers many possibilities in upcoming Internet of Things applications.