Performance evaluation of an IEEE802.15.4 standard based wireless sensor network in Mars exploration scenario

Born as data networks for personal areas (WPAN), wireless sensor networks (WSN) have rapidly gained a growing importance in many other contexts. One of the most interesting and innovative field of application of WSN is represented by the planetary exploration context; taking into account the actual scopes of NASA and ESA, the aim of this paper is to present the performance evaluation of an IEEE802.15.4 standard based network in Mars exploration context. Thanks to an analysis of the Martian geomorphologic, atmospheric and eolian features, a characterization of five most representative frequency channels will be given. Considering such analysis, an evaluation of the performance of an IEEE802.15.4 standard based network is obtained, performing simulation processes with Simulink^reg and OMNET++.