Smart Antennas and Wireless Sensor Networks Achieving efficient, reliable communications

M. Collett and T. Loh1, H. Liu2 and F. Qin3 National Physical Laboratory

Abstract
Wireless Sensor Networks are increasingly being employed for monitoring and sensing in harsh environments such as factories and offshore platforms. This technology has the potential to offer measurements over larger and difficult to access areas, giving more up-to date and precise information to inform control and operational systems. One of the challenges facing the development and adoption of wireless sensor networks is achieving wireless communications which is energy efficient yet robust and resilient. Being low cost and battery powered, wireless sensors have limited resources, which must be used optimally. Beamsteerable smart antennas can give significant improvement in communications performance, and recent developments in parasitic array techniques have led to low power, low cost smart antennas. Here we will present the work carried out at NPL to develop a smart-antenna equipped wireless sensor node. The methods for incorporating and operating the antenna will be described, and the characteristics presented. The significant performance improvement achieved within harsh, reflective environments will be presented, showing that within our test chamber, standard monopole equipped wireless nodes experience significant link loss, while the smart antenna equipped nodes can always achieve a link.

The NPL SMART WSN

In collaboration with the University of Surrey and UCL, NPL has developed a beam-steerable smart antenna for application with wireless sensor networks. This antenna, unlike traditional omni-directional monopoles, is capable of directing the beam in any chosen direction. This has several benefits: Energy is saved because it is only transmitted in the required direction Spectrum is used efficiently and frequencies can be more readily re-used Security is potentially improved as data is only sent in direction of target receiver Locations can be determined by triangulation of beam direction information How it works (See Figure 9) The radio signal drives the central monopole element. The surrounding elements act as a parasitic array. These are connected via varactor diodes. By varying the voltage applied to the varactor diodes, the amount of coupling to the central element can be adjusted. This allows the pattern of the antenna to be changed. This is comparatively simple and suitable to be fed and controlled by a wireless sensor node.

Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) are distributed systems comprising of a number of nodes. Each node consists of: Sensors; Battery; Microprocessor; Radio Chip and Antenna (Figure 1). All of these elements must function together reliably and in a well-understood fashion, if WSNs are to be employed for critical applications. WSNs are capable of multi-hop, ad-hoc communications. This allows nodes to route data via their neighbours making networks energy-efficient, robust and flexible (Figure 2).

Figure 2 Multi-hop communications

Figure 3 Example Wireless Sensor Node

Figure 1 Components of a Wireless Sensor Node and network Figure 9 Smart antenna schematic

Applications
WSNs are suited to a wide variety of distributed sensing, monitoring and control applications. These applications range in scale from large national environmental pollution monitoring networks, to small scale body-worn medical monitoring systems. Each application has its own requirements and challenges.

Figure 12 Beam pattern of one element measured in an anechoic chamber

Figure 10 Smart antenna prototype

SMART WSN in a harsh environment

There are two ways in which a beam steerable antenna can benefit the communications within a harsh reflective environment. Firstly, the fact that the antenna can focus its main beam, reduces reflections from surrounding objects and can reduce destructive multipath interference. Secondly, its adaptive beam forming capability allows the system to alter its configuration if there is the loss of a link, switching to a different direction until a link is found. For omni-directional antenna equipped nodes, the only option may be to physically move a node which is undesirable for remote, hard to access systems.

Figure 4 Structural health monitoring

Figure 5 Acoustic noise monitoring

Figure 6 in home monitoring

Figure 11 Testing in an anechoic chamber

The NPL SMART WSN was tested within a loaded reverberation chamber (Figure 13). This reflective, steel-lined chamber incorporates a reflective stirrer and recreates the effects of harsh highly- reflective environments such as factories and vehicles. Measurement procedure: Transmitting node streams data packets in all directions at fixed rate Receiving node sequentially switches between each of the six beam directions Reception success rate calculated for each direction Repeated for several environmental configurations Findings: Traditional antennas see severe or complete loss for some of environmental configurations SMART antenna system always has at least one beam direction with full reception success rate for all environmental configurations.

Figure 7 - Temperature monitoring

Figure 8 Environmental monitoring

Figure 13 Electromagnetic reverberation chamber with stirrer

Challenges
There remain a number of challenges facing those wishing to develop and deploy wireless sensor networks for critical applications: Reliability How to ensure that the system will be sufficiently reliable. It is also a challenge to define and measure what we mean by reliability and performance. Lifetime How to maximise the lifetime between battery changes, sensor calibrations and remounting etc. The wireless communications aspect of WSNs is the most energy intensive, and in many cases the most fragile part of the system. Any improvements to the efficiency and reliability of the wireless communications will have significant benefit to WSNs in the future.

Figure 14 Link quality within reflective environments

National Physical laboratory 2 University of Surrey 3 University College London

www.npl.co.uk

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