Abstract
Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are consisting of a large number of sensor nodes that sense, gather, and process-specific data. Its importance is dedicated to its enormous application range. It could be used with industrial applications, agricultural applications, military applications, industrial applications, and a lot of other applications, which make it an open area for study by researchers and students. In this paper, the effects of the hidden node problem are studied on three different MAC protocols using various field distances and various numbers of nodes. This study provides the best number of nodes to be disseminated in a specific field distance depending on the needed performance metrics. Six performance metrics are used in this study, which is Goodput, Throughput, PDR, Residual Energy, Average Delay, and first and last node dead in the network. IEEE 802.11, IEEE 802.15.4, and TDMA protocols are the used protocols in this study. Eight different scenarios were proposed and implemented for this study. NS2 is used to construct the proposed scenarios. Results show that TDMA gives the best energy conservation and high delay time with high PDR, while IEEE 802.11 provides the best throughput and Goodput results and low delay time. A graphical view for the results was made to ease of study and analysis.