Performance Analysis of Different Link Layer Protocols in Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN)

This paper presents a fair comparison between different representative link layer protocols for wireless sensor networks: S-MAC, DRAND and Z-MAC protocols. The performance of these protocols is evaluated in terms of power consumption, the use of the propagation channel resources and the traffic rate provided for each node and the overall aggregated traffic. For the experimentation and the performance analysis, an evaluation scenario is built up, including a set of nodes randomly placed around reference places. This scenario is evaluated under different circumstances and traffic load levels. In addition, some conflictive issues are included, such as the presence of ‘bottle necks’ or egoist nodes in the network, and their influence is analyzed for each protocol in order to determine which one copes better with hostile conditions.