Network Load Effects on Wireless Sensor Network Node Activity

Abstract

Due to the failure-prone and vulnerable structure of WSN nodes, understanding the typical activity patterns of nodes helps identify the faulty and malicious node activities and differentiate normal node behaviors from abnormal node behaviors. In this study, for understanding the typical node activities, we observe the effects of the network load on energy consumption, packet throughput, and latency parameters. We run simulations of networks with a variable number of sinks up to 5 in a network of various sizes. We observed a growth in the network load as the source and sink node request activities increased. We found that increasing the number of sinks affects the overall network load and causes communication delays between the source and sink node.