This paper provides a performance evaluation of tree and mesh routing topologies of wireless sensor networks (WSNs) in a cultural heritage site. The historical site selected was San Juan Bautista church in Talamanca de Jarama (Madrid, Spain). We report the preliminary analysis required to study the effects of heating in this historical location using WSNs to monitor the temperature and humidity conditions during periods of weeks. To test which routing topology was better for this kind of application, the WSNs were first deployed on the upper floor of the CAEND institute in Arganda del Rey simulating the church deployment, but in the former scenario there was no direct line of sight between the WSN elements. Two parameters were selected to evaluate the performance of the routing topologies of WSNs: the percentage of received messages and the lifetime of the wireless sensor network. To analyze in more detail which topology gave the best performance, other communication parameters were also measured. The tree topology used was the collection tree protocol and the mesh topology was the XMESH provided by MEMSIC (Andover, MA, USA). For the scenarios presented in this paper, it can be concluded that the tree topology lost fewer messages than the mesh topology
Acknowledgments
The Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness supported this research under grant numbers BIA2009-14395-C04-01 and TEC2012-38402-C04-03. The present study was also funded under project CGL2010-19554. S. Aparicio benefited from funding provided by the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC) through its Post-graduate Studies Council’s post-doctoral specialisation programme (JAE-Doc). Researcher Martínez-Garrido’s was supported by an International Programme for Recruiting Talent (PICATA) predoctoral fellowship awarded by the Moncloa Campus of International Excellence (UPM-UCM, CSIC). J. Ranz benefited from a FPI grant BES-2010-038826 of the Ministry of Education, Culture and Sports. The cooperation received from the Diocese of Alcalá research team is gratefully acknowledged.