Performance Comparison of IP-based Wireless Sensor Network with 802.11

Wireless sensor network is chosen to integrate internet protocols so as to enable the consumer electronics share common resources with the help of a common communication protocol. There are many challenges in such integration, namely incompatible data rates, different address space, more overhead, larger header size and others. Further, the WSN stack may consume more resources like memory, processing power and others after such integration. ZigBee protocol is chosen to implement the proposed work as it is cost effective, offers long range and reliable duplex communication. Solutions to the above mentioned problems are addressed by designing a new stack called ZI (ZigBee-IP stack) with adaptation layer in between the application layer and network layer, routing information protocol ported in the network layer of ZigBee stack and carrier sense multiple access protocol ported in the medium access control layer of ZigBee stack while keeping other layers of ZigBee stack unchanged. Experimentation results of ZI stack when the WSN are presented in this paper. The performance metrics of ZI stack are compared with the old IEEE 802.11 standard which is the widely used standard in all WiFi networks. The performance of such WSN is analysed with the help of results in different cases with respect to IEEE 802.11.