Evaluation of an Electronically Switched Directional Antenna for Real-world Low-power Wireless Networks

We present the real-world evaluation of SPIDA, an electronically switched directional antenna. Compared to most existing work in the field, SPIDA is practical as well as inexpensive. We interface SPIDA with an off-the-shelf sensor node which provides us with a fully working real-world prototype. We assess the performance of our prototype by comparing the behavior of SPIDA against traditional omni-directional antennas. Our results demonstrate that the SPIDA prototype concentrates the radiated power only in given directions, thus enabling increased communication range at no additional energy cost. In addition, compared to the other antennas we consider, we observe more stable link performance and better correspondence between the link performance and common link quality estimators.