Performance Evaluation of Heterogeneous Sensor Networks

Wireless sensor networks are battery-powered ad-hoc networks in which sensor nodes are scattered over a region. These nodes connect to each other and form multi-hop networks. These networks are used for various applications such as habitat monitoring, automation, and agriculture. Almost all the existing sensor networks focus on homogenous sensor networks. Homogenous sensor networks are identical sensors with equal capacity in term of sensing, computation, communication and power. But homogeneous sensor networks have poor performance in terms of energy consumption and end-to-end delay. It is also difficult to work with more than one type of sensors within a same network. So it is required to analyse the heterogeneous sensor networks (HSN) model for better performance. Simulation results prove that heterogeneous sensor networks outperform the homogeneous sensor networks in terms of energy consumption, end-to-end delay and delivery ratio with different node capability.