Simulation analysis of tree and mesh topologies in Zigbee network

Abstract

Recently wireless sensor Network (WSN) and wireless personal area network (WPAN) has gained lot of interest from the research community because of its diverse applications of controlling, monitoring and automation of home, offices or any rescue area. Zigbee based on IEEE 802.15.4 standard is key enabling technology for the success of both WSN and WPAN. Zigbee has some inherent powerful characteristics like very low power consumption, localization and low cost that has drawn the attention of research community recently. Along with merits come the challenges for the success of Zigbee based networks at various layers of the network model. Network topologies in Zigbee are to be selected based on applications and performance requirements. So this paper investigates the performance of Zigbee for tree and mesh topologies. In doing so parameters like MAC throughput, MAC load, MAC delay, end to end delay have been evaluated through extensive simulations using OPNET. The intricate behavior of these topologies in Zigbee shows optimum bounds of performance for these topologies have been computed in this work.