Multi-Hop Wireless Sensor Network Performance and Energy Simulation

Simulation of a multi-hop Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) with different topologies and analysis of its performance in terms of number of messages exchanged and energy usage was done in this study. Sensor nodes in the simulation were modelled after an Arduino hardware system equipped with compatible radio transceiver for communication. The sensor nodes were configured in two network topologies, grid and random topology, for performance comparisons. Network sizes varied between 9 nodes and 256 nodes. Simulation was stopped when the communication link between the sensor nodes and their sink node broke down. It was obtained that grid topology has better performance, especially in small network size. Moreover, when the number of nodes in the network is higher, the performance of random topology network exceeds the grid's performance. Nonetheless, the lifetime span of the sensor network does not depend on the networks size or topology, rather on the available energy in each of the sensor nodes. We also have successfully improved the energy consumption model to account for more parameters of radio transceiver used in a WSN node. The energy needed to turn on and off the radio transceiver plays a significant part in the energy consumption of the sensor node.