Performance study on SNMP and SIP over SCTP in wireless sensor networks

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) have received lots of attention in recent years. WSNs have been applied to multiple fields such as video surveillance, home automation, and health care. How to efficiently manage WSN devices thus becomes an important issue. Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) is an IP-based network management protocol which can collect and modify management information from network devices. Another protocol, Session Initiation Protocol (SIP), is also applied to network management, in addition to its traditional application in IP telephony. SNMP and SIP are both application layer protocols transported over UDP or TCP protocols. Recently, a newly proposed transport layer protocol, Stream Control Transmission Protocol (SCTP), shows its advantages over TCP by providing many new features and better performance. Especially, in a wireless communication environment where data are easy to get lost, SCTP demonstrates excellent performance over TCP. This paper proposes to adopt SNMP and SIP over SCTP as network management protocols and evaluates their behaviors in WSNs.