Protocol design for airdropping meteorological parameters measurement network

Abstract

An airdropped meteorological parameters measurement network (AMPMN) is introduced in this paper. AMPMN with star topology is composed of two kinds of nodes, sensor nodes and one relay node, all equipped with nRF905 radio frequency (RF) modules. A three-layer protocol is built on nRF905 in terms of its configuration. The RF configuration parameters and the payloads formats are set to enable the implementation of carrier sense multiple access with collision avoidance (CSMA/CA) or time division multiple access (TDMA) schemes through programming. The performances of two presented CSMA/CA schemes and one designed TDMA scheme are evaluated by simulation. Based on the simulation results and the difficulty of practical implementation, the CSMA/CA scheme without RTS/CTS is selected for AMPMN. AMPMN will be used in unmanned meteorological parameters measuring over hazard area.