Discovery of Suitable Node Number for Wireless Sensor Networks Based on Energy Consumption using Cooja

In Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) power consumption has a crucial influence on the network performance. It affects the network’s availability, reliability and lifespan and therefore must be kept at minimum. Conducting experiments involving real devices and networks can be too expensive and complex, so a simulator can be used as an alternative in order to simplify the research environment. The simulator used in this paper is Cooja simulator that runs ContikiOS which is commonly used by the WSN hardware platform. The consumed energy was measured using four parameters and in five different tests, varying the number of the sensor nodes, not changing the position of the sink node. The results show that the average power consumption per node is not necessarily connected to the lowest number of nodes, as well as how energy consumption is increased if the node is acting not only as a collector node, but also as a transit node for its neighbouring nodes.