Throughput evaluation of Raspberry Pi devices on multihop and multiflow Wireless Sensor Network scenarios

Abstract

The Raspberry Pi has become one of the most popular devices used in the internet of things studies because of its flexibility and affordability for prototyping purposes. It has found its niche in wireless sensor networks as it can function both as sensor node and router node just by adding wireless adapter. Studies have employed the Raspberry Pi as WSN mesh node and sensor node. These studies looked on the performance of these devices on single flow of data and/or on limited number of hops. Indirectly, they say these devices performs poorly on multihop and multi-flow experimental scenarios. Our experiments show that for multi-hop and multi-flow of scenarios, the raspberry pi nodes actually have enough resource and capacity to maintain good performance. Data flows simply share these resources amongst themselves that results to smaller throughput per flow. We show the appropriateness of Raspberry Pi not only as a sensor node but at the same time act as a mesh node for wireless sensor network studies in different scenarios. To the best of our knowledge, this has not been reported in the literature which should be helpful to other researchers.