Wireless Access Control with Smart Antenna for M2M Communications

Abstract

Machine to machine (M2M) is a promising technology to achieve an ubiquitous environment by uniting machines and machines over the Internet. The network used for M2M consists of core network and access network. This paper discusses effective controls of the wireless access network for M2M. Among typical examples of the wireless access network for M2M is a wireless sensor network (WSN). WSN for M2M may require energy efficiency, high reliability and throughput. For these requirements, in this paper, we propose a scheme to build a hierarchical sensor network using smart antenna. The proposed scheme uses omni-directional antennas together with smart antennas. Since smart antennas can extend communications distance, the proposed scheme enables reduction of number of hops to reduce the traffic load on relay nodes. As a result, the energy consumption, data collection ratio and throughput can be improved. We implement the proposed scheme on a real testbed. The testbed uses UNAGI as smart antenna nodes and Mica Mote as sensor nodes. In addition to the fundamental evaluation on the testbed, we simulate large-scale sensor networks. The results show the effectiveness of the proposed hierarchical sensor network with smart antennas.