Communication performances of IEEE 802.15.4 wireless sensor motes for data-intensive applications: A comparison of WaspMote, Arduino MEGA, TelosB, MicaZ and iMote2 for image surveillance

In this paper, we are investigating the communication performances of low-resources sensor motes that are commonly found in recent smart cities test-beds or used by the research community. We focus here on 802.15.4 radio and we will present a performance study of sending and receiving capabilities of Libelium WaspMote, Arduino-based motes, Telosb-based motes, MicaZ motes and iMote2 motes when a large number of packets needs to be sent from sources to sink node. We provide measures for the minimum time spent in send procedure, minimum time needed to read data into application memory space and maximum sender/receiver throughput. We will highlight the main sources of delays assuming no flow control nor congestion control to determine the best case performance level. Our contribution is therefore in determining the maximum realistic level of performance for commonly found mote platforms in order to predict end-to-end performances for surveillance applications. Finally, we illustrate our study with an image transmission test case for intrusion detection surveillance applications.