Performance research on ZigBee wireless sensor network self-organizing network for 220 kV four-circuit transmission lines on the same tower

Abstract

With the integration of massive power transmission equipment and the Internet of Things (IoT), it is particularly important to choose a suitable low-power sensor networking structure, when facing a large amount of on-site sensing data. To select a suitable ZigBee network structure with a large number of embedded sensing nodes, for 220 kV four-circuit transmission lines on the same tower, this paper uses OPNET simulation software to conduct three different ZigBee wireless sensor network (WSN) models, respectively with star, tree and mesh topologies. Then, the performance of the Media Access Control (MAC) layer (delay and throughput performance), application layer (end-to-end delay and traffic received performance), and network layer (number of hops and packets dropped performance) is further investigated and compared for these three different ZigBee WSNs under 220 kV transmission scenario. Considering that quantity of sensing nodes would influence the ZigBee WSN performance greatly, thus, the simulation results under two application scenarios, 220 kV four-circuit transmission lines on the same tower and 500 kV double-circuit transmission lines on the same tower, were thoroughly compared and analyzed in this paper.