Evaluation of Communication Overheads in Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless sensor network are collection of small sensing self powered nodes organized into a cooperative network which have certain processing capabilities and the nodes communicate wirelessly. Sensing, processing and communication are three key elements whose combination in one node gives rise to a vast number of applications of wireless sensor networks in areas such as environmental monitoring, warfare, education, agriculture to name a few. In the present work, the comparative evaluation of communication overhead due to sink mobility with speed variations, the effect of update time variation, the effect of number of nodes used in the wireless sensor networks is carried out. It has been observed that communication overheads increase significantly when sink mobility is high. The communication overheads can be reduced by increasing update time.