Comparison of MAC Layer Performance of Reactive and Proactive Protocols for Different Mobility Conditions in WSN

Abstract

Wireless sensor networks are the most challenging networks for communication because of its resource constrained nature and the dynamical nature of network topographic anatomy. A lot of research is being going on in the diverse parts of the world for optimum utilization of communication resources in these special types of ad hoc networks. The utility and application domain of sensor networks ranges from commercial, public safety applications and military sector to be the most important ones. The magnificent challenges to the routing algorithms employed in such type of networks are due to the mercurial size of the network and its expandable topology that is quite dynamic in nature. The present paper offers a comparison and analysis of the packet drop at the MAC layer for different routing protocols under an experimental setup having different mobility condition based scenarios of the wireless sensor network application. The comparative study may have also an impact on the improvement of MAC layer performance for different simulation times of the experimental setup considering two of reactive as well as proactive protocols that are most widely used routing protocol in wireless sensor networks. Wireless sensor network application under consideration for the experimental is the battle field monitoring wireless sensor network and the comparative study has been performed for four different mobility patterns described as four different scenarios in the considered experimental application of wireless sensor networks.

The sensor network simulative electronic deception architecture used is for the battle field monitoring application of wireless sensor networks. The application provides support for sensing capabilities within the network nodes called as UGS (Unattended Ground Sensors).Mobile nodes gather data from battle field and direct it to the base station via mobile UGV (Unmanned Ground Vehicles).The performance of the MAC Layer varies with the different average jitter values for different simulation times in the network. Power usage model has been used to reliably represent an actual sensor hardware and sensor network oriented traffic pattern.