Deployment and Evaluation of a 802.15.4 Heterogeneous Network

TL;DR

This paper details the deployment and evaluation of a heterogeneous wireless sensor network using four different 802.15.4 hardware platforms, addressing interoperability challenges and analyzing performance metrics under various conditions.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive methodology for enabling interoperability among diverse 802.15.4 devices and offers an extensive performance evaluation of such a heterogeneous network.

Findings

Different hardware platforms exhibit varying transmission and reception capabilities.

Interoperability requires specific configuration steps due to partial standard implementation.

Network performance is influenced by distance and setup configurations.

Abstract

In this work we study the performance of a heterogeneous wireless sensor network which consists of 4 different hardware platforms (TelosB, SunSPOT, Arduino, iSense). All hardware platforms use 802.15.4 compliant radios. Due to partial implementation of the standard, they do not communicate out of the box. A first contribution of our work is a careful description of the necessary steps to make such a heterogeneous network interoperate. Our software code is available online. We deploy a heterogeneous network testbed and conduct a thorough evaluation of the performance. We examine various network performance metrics (e.g., transmission rate, receiving rate, packet loss, etc.), and assess the capabilities of each device and their intercommunication. We used different setups (e.g., distance between transmitters and receivers, etc.) to better understand the network limitations for each hardware platform.