ABSTRACT

Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) has become an interesting field of research even as its technology is being used largely in Internet of Things (IoTs) and many areas of human endeavour such as civil surveillance, medical diagnosis and so on. This has attracted several research interest including improving the routing and energy efficiency of the sensor nodes in the network to prolong the life of the nodes and the entire system robustness. Hence, many routing protocols have been proposed to improve sensor networks. Nevertheless, most of the proposed protocols are implemented with just some 50 to 100 sensor nodes without considering the efficiency or effectiveness of these protocols in terms of increasing number of nodes per sensor network area (field). In this paper, the effect of increasing node density on performance of Threshold-sensitive Stable Election Protocol (TSEP) is presented. The number of nodes in sensor network of (100 × 100) square metre area was varied from 50, 100, 500, and 1000. The simulation study revealed that increasing the node density increased the number of node alive and throughput performance of TSEP. However, this came with a price as the simulation time was prolonged and the computational complexity increased. Generally, the essential take away or contribution of this paper was to examine the effectiveness of TSEP as the number of nodes per field (or area) in the network is increased, and the simulations conducted revealed that the performance efficiency of the routing protocol drops in terms of computational flexibility and capacity as the node density increases.

Keywords: - Node density, Number of nodes, TSEP, WSN