Performance Improvement of 3D WSNs using Mobile Super Nodes

Mobility is an important research area in Wireless Sensor Networks (MWSNs).The feasibility of mobile nodes is further facilitated by low cost and high energy efficiency. Energy consumption by nodes is an important performance parameter to increase the lifetime of any network. Many protocols for MAC layer have been designed to make efficient energy use by assigning sleep mode in the nodes. WSN deployments were never visualized to be static. Mobility was initially regarded to have many challenges that were needed to overcome including connectivity, coverage, and energy consumption, etc. In this paper, an energy-efficient multi-layer Medium Access Control (ML-MAC) protocol is analyzed with the use of mobile super nodes for 3-Dimensional wireless sensor networks. The results are validated through extensive simulations. Simulation results prove that use of mobile super nodes in ML-MAC outperforms original ML-MAC protocol in terms of throughput, network lifetime, packets dropped, and end to end delay.