Performance Analysis of IEEE 802.15.4/ZigBee Wireless Sensor Networks.

Wireless sensor networks are becoming very popular from daily life to environmental monitoring, agriculture, health care, home automation and many more. The survey on these types of networks showed that, the deployment of such sensor networks has dramatically improved in recent years and will boost in the future due to the release of two standards by IEEE and ZigBee Alliance, named as IEEE 802.15.4 standard and ZigBee standard respectively. This is because ZigBee is the only unique standard developed for low-power, a low-cost, low-data rate based wireless technology network, that provides network security, and application support services operating on top of the IEEE 802.15.4 Medium Access Control (MAC) and Physical (PHY) Layer wireless standard. Therefore, it will be beneficial to study the performance of IEEE 802.15.4/ZigBee sensor networks so that, various solutions can be introduced to improve the quality of such networks. In this paper, the analysis of IEEE 802.15.4/ZigBee network has been done by using throughput and energy remaining per node as the performance metrics. The simulations are done in Network Simulator 2, which is an object oriented network simulating tool.