ZigBee-Based Wireless Sensor Network Topology Design and Comparison in Residential Areas

Abstract

When designing a wireless sensor network based on ZigBee, it is very important to choose the right network topology, especially in networks with many nodes such as residential areas. Choosing the wrong topology will have an impact on the performance of the wireless sensor network as a whole because it will cause a large delay value. To overcome this, in this study a ZigBee-based wireless sensor network simulation was carried out using an environmental model consisting of several residential units, with one ZigBee device for each house. In addition, three ZigBee network topologies namely mesh, star, and tree are used in this simulation. This is done to determine which topology model will work best in a residential environment. The housing used for the simulation in this study is Citraland Waterfront City Housing which is located in Palu City, Central Sulawesi Province, Indonesia. By using simulations in the Opnet Modeler 14.5 application, it is known that the star topology on the ZigBee network is suitable for application in residential areas with a large number of nodes. This can be seen from the highest throughput values and the lowest media access delay, end-to-end delay, hop number, and packet dropped values compared to tree and mesh topologies.