Performance Study of ZigBee-based Green House Monitoring System

Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) is an emerging multi-hop wireless network technology, and the greenhouse network monitoring system is one of the key applications of WSNs in which various parameters such as temperature, humidity, pressure and power can be monitored. Here, we aim to study the performance of a simulation-based greenhouse monitoring system. To design the greenhouse monitoring system based on WSN, we have used ZigBee-based devices (end devices, routers, coordinators, and actuators. Our proposed greenhouse monitoring network has been designed and simulated using the network simulator OPNET Modeller.The investigation is split into two; first, the aim is to find the optimal Transmit (Tx) power set out at sensor nodes and second, the focus is on studying how increasing the number of sensor nodes in the same greenhouse network will affect the overall network performance. ZigBee-based greenhouses corresponded to 4 network scenarios and are simulated using OPNET Modeller in which 22 different transmit (Tx) power (22 cases) in Scenario 1 is simulated, scenario 2, 3 and 4 estimated to 63, 126, 189 number of sensor nodes respectively. Investigating the performance of the greenhouse monitoring network performance metrics such as network load, throughput, packets sent/received and packets loss are considered to be evaluated under varied transmit (Tx) power and increasing number of sensor nodes. Out of the comprehensive studies concerning simulation results for 22 different transmit (Tx) power cases underlying the greenhouse monitoring network (Scenario1), it is found that packets sent/received and packets loss perform the best with the transmitted (Tx) power falling in a range of 0.9 mWatt to 1.0 mWatt while packet sent/received and packet loss are found to perform moderately with the transmitted (Tx) power values that lie in a range of 0.05 mWatt to 0.8 mWatt. Less than 0.05 mWatt and greater than 0.01 microWatt Tx power experience, the worst performance in terms of particularly packet dropped case. For instance, in the case of the packet dropped (not joined packet, i.e., generated at the application layer but not able to join the network due to lack of Tx power), with a Tx power of 0.01 mWatt, 384 packets dropped with a Tx power of 0.02 and 0.03 mWatt, 366 packets dropped, and with a Tx power of 0.04 and 0.05, 336 packet dropped.While increasing the number of sensor nodes, as in scenario 2, 3 and 4, dealing with sensor nodes 63, 126 and 189 correspondingly, the MAC load, MAC throughput, packet sent/received in scenario 2 are found to perform better than that of scenario 3 and scenario 4, while packet loss in scenarios 2, 3 and 4 appeared to be 15%, 12% and 83% correspondingly