Performance evaluation of an IEEE 802.15.4 standard based wireless sensor network in Mars exploration scenario

The IEEE 802.15.4 standard (ZigBee) provides low cost and low power connectivity for Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) devices that need a monthly or years duration of battery, with low DataRate and small dimensions. All such features fit pretty well the requirements of a space mission and for this reason the spatial community is investigating the possibility of using WSN in planetary exploration context, in particular on Mars. After an accurate analysis of the past missions retrieved data, we individuate the most common propagation contexts on Mars and we evaluate the performance of an IEEE802.15.4 standard based sensor network working at 2.4GHz for that contexts. In order to evaluate the applicability of the IEEE 802.15.4 standard to planetary exploration context, a characterization of the most common five frequency channel is obtained taking into account all the Martian geomorphologic, atmospheric and eolian features. Considering such frequency channels, thanks to Simulink and OMNET++ simulation models, network performances like Bit Error Rate (BER), Symbol Error Rate (SER) and Throughput are obtained. The possibility to implement a packet level coding is also investigated.