INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF MULTIDISCIPLINARY EDUCATIONAL RESEARCH

ISSN : 2277-7881; IMPACT FACTOR - 2.735; IC VALUE:5.16

VOLUME 3, ISSUE 9(2), SEPTEMBER 2014

ANALYSIS ON PACKET SIZE OPTIMIZATION TECHNIQUES

IN WIRELESS SENSOR NETWORKS
P. Venkatesh
PG Scholar
Department of CSE
Adhiyamaan College of
Engineering
Hosur, Tamil Nadu, India

Dr. M. Prabu
Professor
Department of CSE
Adhiyamaan College of
Engineering
Hosur, Tamil Nadu, India

I. INTRODUCTION
Wireless Sensor Networks is collection of sensing devices that can
communicate wirelessly. Each device can perform three important
tasks such as, Sense, process and talk to its peers. Hence it has
centralized Collection point (sink or base station). A WSN can be
defined as network devices, denoted as node, which can sense the
environment and communicate through wireless links. The data is
forwarded, possibly via multiple hops to sink, that can use its locally or
is connected to other network (e.g. internet) through gateway. The
node can be Stationary or moving. They can be homogeneous or not [1].
The traditional single-sink WSN may suffer from lack of scalability. So
by increasing large number of nodes, amount of data gathered by sink
increases and once its capacity is reached, the network cannot be
increased. Furthermore, for reasons related to MAC and routing
aspects, network performance cannot be considered independent from
the network size.

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Fig.1. Architecture of wireless sensor network

As there are many problems in the single sink scenario, moving to
multiple sink scenario can be scalable and also increase the
performance of the WSN in terms of increasing the number of the
nodes, which it not possible in the single sink scenario. In many cases
nodes send the collected data to one sink, select among many, which
forward data to the gateway, towards the final user. The selection of
sink is based on certain suitable criteria that could be, for example,
minimum delay, maximum throughput, minimum number of hops etc.,
Hence the presence of multiple sink ensures better network
performance with respect to single sink case where designing part is
more complex for communication protocol and must design according
to suitable criteria[2].
The WSN can be used for a variety of applications such as
Environment monitoring [3], healthcare, positing [4]and tracking [5]
etc., The applications of the wireless sensor network can be classified
according to the Event Detection (ED) and the Spatial Process
Estimation (SPE) .

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Fig. 2. Left side Single-sink scenario and Right side Multi-sinkscenario] [2]
In the ED scenario, the sensor is deployed to detect the events such as,
fire in the forest, Earthquake. In SPE scenario it is deployed to monitor
the physical phenomenon (for example atmospheric pressure in a wide
area or temperature variation in a small volcanic site), which can be
modeled as a bi-dimensional random process (generally non-stationary).
Power consumption plays an important role in the WSN, so the
designers are now mainly focusing on the power aware- protocol and
algorithm for design of energy efficient sensor network. For all the
operations to be performed in the network, such as sensing
information, processing the information and forwarding to the sink
node. Hence the power consumption and power management are more
important in the wireless sensor networks [1].

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II. RELATED WORK

In the WSN packet size is a major problem, which will directly affect
the reliability and the performance of communication between the
nodes. However choosing the packet size must be optimal. According to
the first scenario the packet size is long in WSN that causes data bit
corruption and data packet re-transmission [6]. Power consumption is
also high during the transmission of data packet to the sink which in
turn ultimately loses the performance of the WSN when the packet size
is long.
In second scenario the packet size is small, which increase the data
transmission reliability and reduces the data bit error. But short packet
size degrades the performance of the WSN. Also management of packet
at each node will become complicated. So many techniques were
developed so far to get an optimal packet size for the WSN, but most of
the researchers suggest fixed packet size [7].The minority researchers
are promoting the use of the dynamic packet length [8] i.e. variable size
of data packets in WSN. In this survey report numbers of techniques
have been discussed to obtain an appropriate data packet size in WSN
and finally the conclusion for each technique.
III. DISCUSSION AND RESULT
Various techniques are used for packet size optimization for wireless
sensor networks. A range of techniques were developed by the different
researcher for the packet size optimization in WSN.The researchers
have majorly focus on the two approaches which is, either fixed packet
size or variable packet size approach. In this section we discuss those
approaches and results.
A. Fixed size packet in WSN
In the [7] they have used the fixed packet size in WSN rather than the
variable packet size. Even though the variable packet size will increase
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the throughput of the channel and enhance the wireless sensor network
transmission mechanism the simplicity of such independent system is
also compromised. Since choosing the variable packet size leads to the
resource management overhead they choose the fixed size data packets
for energy efficient WSN. Basically, there are three fields in the data
packet.
1) Packet header.
2) Payload/Data Segment.
3) Packet Trailer.
The packet header contains many fields that are usually less important
for WSN nodes and removing those will help us to reduce the packet
size in the WSNs. Those fields include current segment number, total
number of segments, packet identifiers, source and destination
identifiers [7].By employing these method the overall throughput and
efficiency is increased.

Fig 3. Packet format [7]

B. Variable Size packet in WSNs
In the [8] variable packet size in WSNs plays a vital role and this paper
describes the creation of packet size according to the channel condition
i.e. in a dynamic manner, they developed a scheme called dynamic
packet length control. In the WSNs if the channel is noisy or busy
(means it is congested having lots of packets) it will automatically
create small packets. When the channel is empty or channel if it is
capable of processing large packet means it will automatically generate
the large packet size. By using this method they are increasing the
overall throughput and efficiency.

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C. Framework for optimization of packet size

There are various researchers who developed lot of frameworks for
creating or generating an optimal packet size for reducing the energy
consumption and to increase the throughput and energy efficiency in
WSN. In this framework [9] for packet optimization in WSNs, they are
describing that the longer packet size is more appropriate than the
shorter packet size in some case. In certain situation this may lead to
inefficiency in the WSNs. The framework must be employed there to
find an appropriate method for optimal solution to the problem in
wireless sensor networks. The paper [9] used a framework to find the
optimal packet size based on some performance metric. The metric
consists of the throughput, energy consumption per bit, latency, and
packet error rate.
D.

Various packet size used in different techniques

In this paper [10], they describe that if small packet size produces more
energy efficient in WSN, overhead of each packet is ignored. Tracking
per packet overhead created in WSN will lead to favor large size packet
for this type of resource constrained in tiny sensor node. So it depends
on overhead produced by each packet generation in WSN. There are
some suggested packet sizes as follows

Fig. 4. Effect of packet size on the ESB [10]

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There are some other packet formats designed by the researchers for
energy efficiency in wireless sensor networks. In the paper [11] they
describe different header formats and researchers could use predefined
formats for designing their own packets. Designers have to design their
packet header using common header format that is shown in the figure
below

Fig. 5. Packet header format [11]

In the paper [12], they describe the Dynamic Packet length control
scheme that provides more efficient terms of channel utilization than
the paper [8]. They provide two services, i.e., small message
aggregation and large message Fragmentation. By using those services
they provide better performance compared to the previous works. The
two service are shown clearly in the below figure.

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Fig. 6. DPLC overview [12]

IV. PROPOSED WORK
The proposed work describes and improves the data aggregation i.e.
decrease the power consumption and increase the life time of packet
send between the two nodes using BEAR protocol. The data
aggregation scheme is used to improve the network functionality with
energy competence. Each and every sensor is used to minimize the
energy consumption. In data aggregation there are various algorithms
used to measure the performance such as lifetime, data accuracy and
latency. To improve the lifetime of the mobility nodes based on the
centralized and localized algorithm by using the BEAR [A Balanced
Energy Aware Routing] Protocols, the dynamic fixed length packets
lifetime is measured and this protocol increases the coverage areas to
get better performance and where large nodes are to be used.
Wireless sensor network latency refers to data transmission, data
aggregation and routing. It defines the time delay between the sink and
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destination. This paper decides to improve the coverage areas, lifetime

and also decreases the power consumptions by the protocol. Source
node sends packet to destination node where the source node has the
backup and increases the networks lifetime generated and maintain by
the centralized and localized algorithm. While sending the source node
is in off mode and after receiving the acknowledgement it moves to on
mode so, in this way the energy consumption is minimized, increases
the data size and lifetime and avoids the latency.
V. CONCLUSION
In

the

Wireless

Sensor

Networks

major

factor

deciding

the

performance, i.e. to choose the packet size leads to efficiency in energy.

There are so many researchers who proposed packet size format and
there are also some framework approaches for the same. According to
above analysis some of the researcher have encouraged fixed size packet
for the data transmission in the sensor node, whereas at the same time
other researchers encourage variable size packet for data transmission
in the sensor node according to the channel capacity. The former
approaches are easy to implement and process less overhead but they
are inefficient with regards to energy efficiency, overall throughput and
performance. Next approaches are capable with respect to energy
efficiency, throughput and performance but major drawback is it
possess a lot of overhead at each node. Each and every approaches and
framework has their own negative aspect and the positive aspect. Yet
we develop an optimal approach which combines the advantages of the
previous approach and avoids the drawbacks in those approaches.
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VOLUME 3, ISSUE 9(2), SEPTEMBER 2014

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