Connectivity Checking and Bridging for Wireless Sensor Networks with Directional Antennas

Abstract

Connectivity is a fundamental requirement for wireless sensor networks deployment. Different from the most of the existing studies using omni-directional antennas, this paper studies the issue of connectivity checking and bridging for wireless sensor networks using directional antennas. Using graph theory, we first present a connectivity checking algorithm in order to find disconnected parts of a network. We secondly utilize the capability of directional antennas to bridge these disconnected parts thus overcoming the separation problem of multi-hop sensor networks. Simulations are performed to prove the effectiveness of our solution, which can significantly improve connectivity between member nodes and sink at the same power or even less power.