Communication performance of low-resource sensor motes for data-intensive applications

We study the communication performance of low-resource sensor motes that are commonly found in smart cities test-beds or used by the research community. We focus here on 802.15.4 radio and we present a performance study of sending and receiving capabilities of Libelium WaspMote, Arduino-based motes, Telosb-based motes and MicaZ motes when a large number of packets needs to be streamed from sources to sink node. We provide measures for the minimum time spent in send procedure, minimum time needed to read data into application memory space and maximum sender/receiver throughput. We highlight the main sources of delays assuming no flow control nor congestion control to determine the best case performance level. Our contribution is therefore in determining the maximum realistic level of performance for commonly found mote platforms in order to predict end-to-end performances for data-intensive applications such as multi-hop multimedia streaming for surveillance.