Performance Evaluation of Intercluster Multi-hop Communication Large-Scale Sensor Networks

In large-scale sensor networks, multi-hop communication between sensor nodes is necessary to cover a large monitoring region. Moreover, sensor nodes should be grouped into clusters to enhance scalability and robustness. We examine the characteristics of multi-hop communication between clusters in large-scale sensor networks and compare them with other routing methods. We also investigate the characteristics of sensor networks by comparing TDMA with CSMA/CA. If positional information of all sensor nodes is available, a transmission schedule that avoids interference completely can be constructed and TDMA can be applied. However, gathering this information and distributing the schedules over large monitoring region are impossible practically. Therefore, we also apply CSMA/CA since the information of only neighboring sensor nodes is necessary. As a result, using CSMA/CA, power consumption increases by 12% and the packet collection time becomes about four times longer in comparison to using TDMA based on location information of all sensor nodes.