Performance Evaluation of a Wireless Sensor Network for Mobile and Stationary Event Cases Considering Routing Efficiency and Goodput Metrics

Sensor networks are a sensing, computing and communication infrastructure that are able to observe and respond to phenomena in the natural environment and in our physical and cyber infrastructure. The sensors themselves can range from small passive microsensors to larger scale, controllable weather-sensing platforms. Presently, there are many research works for sensor networks. In our previous work, we built a simulation system for simulation the sensor networks. But, we considered that the event node is stationary in the observation field. However, in many applications the event node may move. For example, in an ecology environment the animals can move randomly. In this work, we investigate how the sensor network performs in the case when the event node moves. We carried out the simulations for lattice topology and TwoRayGround radio model considering AODV and DSR protocols. For the performance evaluation, we considered two metrics: routing efficiency and goodput and we compare the simulation results for two cases: when the event node is mobile and stationary. The simulation results have shown that the routing efficiency for the case of mobile event node is better than the stationary event node using AODV protocol. Also, the goodput for the mobile event node case does not change too much compared with the stationary event case using AODV, but the goodput is not good when the number of nodes is increased.