Practical Remarks on Designing a Local Segment in a Wide-area Wireless Sensor Network for Measuring Factors Hazardous to the Environment

Abstract

In order to construct an effective wide-area sensor network, an optimal solution consists in dividing it into a local and a core segment. On the local side, the ZigBee technology is commonly applied to transfer sensor data as it offers effective mechanisms of self-organization and automatic reorganization in case of failure. Since ZigBee is claimed to be natively suited to multi-hop transmission, its performancein terms of throughput and delaywas quantitatively tested in a chain topology consisting of up to five hops. The achievable data rates were found to be exponentially decreasing with successive hops whereas the delay was growing linearly. A strong dependence was also confirmed between an antenna type used on ZigBee devices and the maximum achievable operating range.