Framework for Designing of Wireless Sensor Network Using OPNET and Effect of Transport Protocols on Simulation

A Wireless sensor network can be defined as a network of devices that can communicate the information gathered from a monitored field through wireless links. The data is forwarded through multiple nodes, and with a gateway, the data is connected to other networks like wireless Ethernet. It is intended for a general application and should be able to collect data from many nodes, every node connected to several sensors. One possible application for such a network is in the medical area. At first the network will be used to display the evolution of blood pressure; the body temperature, the ambient temperature and pressure and the level of the transfusion liquid can be collected as well. The network coordinator will transmit the data to a local server for further processing. The simulation will be used to evaluate the general parameters of the wireless network and to optimize it. In this paper, we aim to evaluate the performance of a ZigBee wireless sensor network using OPNET and also study the effects of TCP and UDP on the performance of the application based on OPNET simulation software.