Impact of various data packet sizes on the performance of WSN-based clusters: Study

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) have attracted the interest of a wide range of academic researchers, engineers, scientists, and technicians. This attraction stems from their numerous research areas, including energy efficiency, data transmission, coverage, connectivity, load balancing, security, reliability, scalability, and network lifetime. In WSN applications, sensor nodes rely on batteries with a limited lifetime to function. In addition, the size of the sensor nodes' data packets affects the battery lifetime. This is because the energy efficiency is affected by the size of the data transmissions from the node to the base station (BS). Therefore, in this work, the impact of different packet sizes on the performance of WSN-based clusters is investigated. The simulation experiments are performed using MATLAB. The performance metrics measured are energy consumption per transmission, alive node per round, and alive node per transmission. The results of this study show that the size of the transmitted data packets affects the lifetime of WSN-based clusters. To achieve high performance, it is recommended to integrate routing protocols with data reduction methods.