A performance analysis for packet scheduling schemes of wireless sensor networks

Background: Wireless sensor networks have a wide range of applications such as home automation systems, industrial process monitoring, health care monitoring, and others. It contains a number of sensor nodes that collect data from the environments and send it to a base station. Packet scheduling algorithms are responsible of designing the structure of ready queues and selection of possible packets. They can be classified according to some factors such as data types, data priorities, data deliveries, and number of ready queues. Previous works have used few performance metrics to consider the efficiency of these algorithms. Objective: This paper performs a comparative study uses seven performance metrics to analyze the performance of three new packet scheduling algorithms in wireless sensor networks with two well-known previous scheduling schemes. The metrics are throughput, packet delivery ratio, average waiting time, average delay, energy consumption, packet loss ratio, and network lifetime. Method: This paper uses a simulator network, which is programmed using Java language and is running on an Intel® Core™ i7 machine. The sensor nodes are deployment randomly and sequentially. Results: The simulation results illustrate that the scheduling algorithms are nearly the same in both deployments in packet delivery ratio and throughput metrics. Sequential deployment is preferred average waiting time, average delay, energy consumption, and packet loss ratio metrics while random deployment is preferred in the network lifetime metric. Conclusion: This paper illustrates the packet scheduling algorithms in wireless sensor networks that are the most suitable for the applications that consider a certain metric.