Securing and Greening Wireless Sensor Networks with Beamforming

Improving energy efficiency is one of the most important aspects in the Wireless Sensor Networks, being one of their main design goals. A key technique used in a wide range of wireless technologies is beamforming, as it provides a way of efficiently transmitting the radio signals towards a given (set of) target direction(s). In this work, the beamforming technique is jointly used with clustering in order to increase the lifetime in WSNs. In particular, scenarios with 2, 4, 5 and 10 nodes that install either ideal isotropic antennas or conventional dipoles are considered. The target direction to configure the beam has been set to ϕ = 0° and ϕ = 45°. Also, it is shown that beamforming can be used to transmit both efficiently and securely the signals by decreasing the power radiated in the direction of an enemy node. Different cases are analyzed with a different number of base stations and a different number of enemy nodes. A genetic algorithm (GA) is applied to optimize the number of clusters and the phase and amplitude of the antennas of the WSN nodes in all scenarios and cases raised. Up to the authors’ knowledge, beamforming techniques have not been previously applied together to reduce the energy consumption in WSN and secure the communications simultaneously.