Directional Antennas

Technology Name and one line description

Directional Antennas for the Emergency Electronic Life Line.

Short Description

Directional antenna on the fire fighter.
When the fire fighter turns in the right direction, the received signal strength of the target motes should be the highest. In this way, the accuracy to find the right way can be improved compared to non direc-tional antenna case.

Use in WearIT@Work Project

The directional antennas have been used in experiments at DoCoMo for gathering readings from the beaconing nodes along the emergency life line. Thus, computing the RSSI values from the beacons, the algorithm, running in a micaZ mote connected to the antenna, can output the direction to take as the one pointing to the mote with the strongest RSSI (we take into account different transmitting power levels and a certain average of such output values).

Status/Maturity Level (?)

The hardware of our tracking system, based on a directional antenna connected to the sink node (here a micaZ mote, but it should be owned by a fire-fighter), where the life line is made of micaZ and tmote sky motes, is reasonably robust as has been proven with several experiments at DoCoMo.