The IDEAS laboratory cooperates with the embedded-networking group and networking firm-ware group to execute a cross-layer design of wireless sensor network NSF project. Our lab provides the propagation statistics to higher network stacks for cross-layer design, and a novel architecture for RF front-end (arrogant antennas) was proposed and implemented. Four semi-directional antennas covering about ninety degrees and a switching network are applied to sensor motes to replace an omni-directional antenna. Utilizing this new deirectional diversity the infrastructure of the wireless sensor network is improved and the functionality of wireless sensors is also expanded. For instance, based on our design and algorithm, each senor mote can detect the location of another sensor mote independently without outside information from neighboring motes. With coordination from multiple motes, the performance can be further improved. This performance is also insensitive to the topology of the anchor motes.

We develop techniques of integrated antenna package for this architecture and a test bed to observe a fundamental characteristic of the propagation channel using directional antennas. The peer-to-peer performance of link quality using this directional antenna set was tested and outperforms the conventional omni-directional antennas both in line-of-sight and non-line-of-site environments.
Techniques of intelligent antenna packaging for this architecture are developing and a generic test bed is being implemented to test the system level performance and observe the fundamental characteristics of the propagation channel using directional antennas. Furthermore, the wireless sensor network will be implemented in some real world systems for live testing.