D-STAR MAC Protocol: A Cross Layer Solution for Wireless Sensor Networks Endowed with Directive Antennas

Abstract— This paper deal with a novel MAC layer protocol, namely Directive Synchronous Transmission Asynchronous Reception (D-STAR) able to logically synchronize a Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) by managing both sleep/active states together with integrating directional antennas within the communications framework, according to a cross-layer design. D-STAR protocol has been characterized in terms of functional characteristics and the overall performance is presented, in terms of network lifetime gain, set-up latency and collision probability. It is shown a remarkable gain with respect to the basic approach endowed with omnidirectional antennas without increasing the signaling overhead nor affecting the set up latency, but achieving energy consumption reduction.