An Efficient Beam Scanning Algorithm for Hidden Node Collision Avoidance in Wireless Sensor Networks

摘要

Wireless sensor networks are characterized by an assembly of low power nodes that collect information about the environmental conditions and report to a base station in general. The hidden node collision problem is one major problem faced by the wireless sensor networks (WSNs). Many solutions have been proposed and implemented with an aim to mitigate to the effect of the same. H-NAMe is one such scheme that fulfills the quality-of-service (QoS) requirements imposed by the applications of the WSNs. It relies on a grouping strategy that splits each cluster of a WSN into disjoint groups of non-hidden nodes that scales to multiple clusters that guarantees no interference between overlapping clusters. A design weakness identified in this scheme, energy consumption of nodes, when a new node tries to join a group, has been eliminated by the proposed work. In this paper, an efficient Intra cluster grouping scheme (IC-GS) for a new node to be added into the WSN with and without beam scanning is proposed and simulated using network simulator. The IC-GS with beam scanning is different from the IC-GS scheme as it proposes a beam scanning process at every fixed angle to determine a cluster head using directional antennas before it communicated with the determined cluster head. The simulation results are provided to prove that IC-GS with beam scanning as an energy efficient method for hidden node collision avoidance in WSNs.