experimental evaluation of multi-hop routing protocols for wireless sensor networks
Performance of a deployed Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) is greatly influenced by the interference it is subject to during operation. Degradation happens due to interference resulting in packet drops, retransmissions, link instability and inconsistent protocol behavior. These potential sources of interference must be accounted for during the design stage of a WSN in order to achieve acceptable network performance. Based on these observations, we have proposed a multi-hop routing protocol for ZigBee based WSN that takes into account interference caused by WiFi networks in operation in the vicinity and uses multiple channels at different frequencies to increase the network throughput. This paper details an empirical study that compare the network performance of our proposed multi-hop multi-channel routing protocol with other popular multi-hop routing protocols. This study shows that interference caused by WiFi and co-channel contention degrades the network performance of multi-hop routing protocols unless proactive measures are taken to mitigate the adverse effects of these interference.
multi-hop routing sensor networks