On the Effects of Communication Range Shrinkage of Sensor Nodes in Mobile Wireless Sensor Networks Due to Adverse Environmental Conditions

A wireless sensor network (WSN) is a collection of spatially distributed sensor nodes working collaboratively to monitor a physical environment. A mobile wireless sensor network (MWSN) is a specific type of WSN, in which the sensor nodes move within a designated area. In this paper, we consider the effects of adverse environmental conditions on MWSN. Conditions such as high temperature, rainfall, and fog cause attenuation and fading effects on the communication of sensor nodes. Consequently, the communication ranges of such nodes shrink, and the sensor nodes cannot communicate with any of their peers. The shrinkage in communication range creates impairment in the normal communication ability of sensor nodes, which results in link disruption, packet loss, performance degradation, and reduced lifetime of the network. As the adverse environmental conditions are temporal in nature, the sensor nodes function normally with the resumption of favorable environmental conditions. The existing literature did not consider this type of temporary problem on MWSNs. In this paper, we evaluated the performance of MWSN due to the presence of adverse environmental conditions. Simulation results confirm the hypotheses that the performance of MWSN degrades in the presence of adverse environmental conditions. From the results it can be inferred that throughput and delivery ratio nearly decreases by 66% and 42%, respectively, whereas delay increases by 75% due to the shrinkage in communication range.