2017 International Conference on Signals and Systems (ICSigSys)
Throughput Evaluation of Raspberry Pi Devices on
Multihop and Multiflow Wireless Sensor Network
Scenarios
Mike Cristian B. Gragasin, Miguel Paulo A. Talplacido, Nemesio A. Macabale Jr.
Information Systems Institute, Central Luzon State University
Science City of Muñoz, Philippines
mike.gragasin,paulo.talplacido,namacabale{@clsu.edu.ph}
Abstract—The Raspberry Pi has become one of the most
popular devices used in the internet of things studies because of its
flexibility and affordability for prototyping purposes. It has found
its niche in wireless sensor networks as it can function both as
sensor node and router node just by adding wireless adapter.
Studies have employed the Raspberry Pi as WSN mesh node and
sensor node. These studies looked on the performance of these
devices on single flow of data and/or on limited number of hops.
Indirectly, they say these devices performs poorly on multihop and
multi-flow experimental scenarios. Our experiments show that for
multi-hop and multi-flow of scenarios, the raspberry pi nodes
actually have enough resource and capacity to maintain good
performance. Data flows simply share these resources amongst
themselves that results to smaller throughput per flow. We show
the appropriateness of Raspberry Pi not only as a sensor node but
at the same time act as a mesh node for wireless sensor network
studies in different scenarios. To the best of our knowledge, this
has not been reported in the literature which should be helpful to
other researchers.
Keywords—raspberry pi 3; olsrd; mesh; wireless sensor
network; IOT
I. INTRODUCTION
The Internet of Things(IOT) is a novel technological
advancement that is gaining ground in the world today. The
general idea of the technology is the presence of “things” like
mobile devices, sensors or other objects interacting with each
other for a particular goal [1]. Even the US National Intelligence
Council recognizes it in the list of six ‘‘Disruptive Civil
Technologies” with potential impacts on US national power[2].
NIC foresees that ‘‘by 2025 Internet nodes may reside in
everyday things – food packages, furniture, paper documents,
and more”. Future demand will promote wide spread
deployment of IOT devices in different key sectors, e.g.
environment, industry, health, and military.[2][3]
An enabling technology for IOT is the wireless sensor
network(WSN) [1]. Wireless sensor networks applications
include military operations, indoor and outdoor environmental
monitoring, logistic support for business, health, and even
robotics [3]. Commercial and customized wireless sensor
networks [4] use the IEEE 802.15.4 (WPAN) [5], however, this
poses problems as (1) The largest physical layer packet in IEEE
802.15.4 has 127 bytes; the resulting maximum frame size at the
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media access control layer is 102 octets, which may further
decrease based on the link layer security algorithm. Such sizes
are too small when compared to typical IP packet sizes. (2)
sensor nodes spend most of their time in sleep mode to preserve
energy which hinders them from communicating (3) scalability
problems due to the need to use router nodes to connect sensor
nodes to the base station.
To address the issues above studies[7] have used the
Raspberry Pi [6] acting as a sensor node and mesh node in a
WSN. Eric Erfanian showed an easy to follow way to set up[19]
the raspberry pi as a wireless network using three nodes and a
gate way. These studies[8][9][10][11] focused on range,
throughput, the ability to self-heal and multihop, throughput
degradation, and even power consumption. Studies on the
Raspberry Pi[7] as a mesh node focused only on one(1) flow of
data which is not the case in WSN scenarios[15]. Previous
studies used the raspberry pi in experimental scenario that uses
multiple flow of data in two-hop set up and gets extremely low
throughput. They attributed this to the raspberry pi’s resource
limitations. Indirectly, they looked at this device as not suitable
for wide/full scale multihop wireless sensor network
experiments and deployment.
In this study, we show that the Raspberry Pi devices have
enough resource to handle the above mentioned situations. We
further show the appropriateness the use of Raspberry Pi in
Wireless Sensor networks with multi hop, multi flow
applications. The rest of the paper is organized as follows.
Section II discusses other studies conducted on the feasibility of
using the Raspberry Pi as MANET mesh node. Section III
contains the testing design. Section IV shows the
implementation and results of the testing. Finally Section V
presents the conclusion.
II. RELATED WORK
Most studies[9][10] involving IOT are mostly done through
simulation software like Network Simulator 2 and Network
Simulator 3 (NS2 & NS3) [13][14]. However it is difficult to
capture the complexity of wireless communications in real
environment in simulations[16]. Some studies[11][12] use
consumer off the shelf(COTS) devices that partner laptops with
wireless adapters which is too expensive in terms of cost, and
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power for a sensor node. Others use IEEE802.15.4 devices like

the Zigbee[17] which are low cost but have low data packet
sizes, low processing power and requires low level
programming expertise. Raspberry Pi is an appropriate choice as
sensor node because of its high performance, good memory,
affordable cost, and operating system that allows programming
in high level languages [13].
Raspberry Pi devices are among the most suited as wireless
mesh node, capable of multi hop, self-healing, and a
communication range of around 170 m[14]. Previous studies [8]
showed that although the Raspberry Pi 3 can hold a high enough
throughput for single hop [8], it performs poorly for multi hop
and multi flow scenarios. These results discourages the use of
raspberry pi for multihop multiflow wireless sensor network
experiments. On the other hand, we show that the raspberry pi
nodes actually have enough resource and capacity to maintain Figure 1. Device Raspberry Pi 3
good performance. Data flows simply share these resources
amongst themselves that results to smaller throughput per flow.
We show the appropriateness of Raspberry Pi for Wireless
Sensor Network studies in different scenarios.

III. EXPERIMENTAL SET UP

This section contains two sub sections. The first sub section
describes the set up and configuration of the Raspberry Pi mesh
nodes used. The second one describes the experimental
scenarios used to demonstrate the appropriateness of the
Raspberry Pi as a wireless sensor/mesh node. Although we show
their appropriateness as wireless sensor nodes our tests tackle its
capabilities as a relay node in wireless sensor networks.

A. Raspberry Pi Configuration Figure 2. Device Raspberry Pi 3 with TP LINK TL-WN722N

Three pieces of Raspberry Pi hardware with same For design and implementation of the sensor network
specifications were used for the mesh nodes. The Raspberry Pi devices, the following software were installed in the Raspberry
3 a 700MHz clock speed single board computer was chosen Pi3. The operating system used was Raspbian based on the
since it has the appropriate tools to function both as a mesh node Debian Linux Distro to easily install other packages on the
and a possible sensor node because of its general purpose input- Raspberry Pi 3. OLSRD for ad-hoc network implementation and
output (gpio) pins which enables other modules such as sensors Iperf for network testing.
(soil, temperature, light, etc..) to be added to it. A Wireless
Here is an ad hoc device set up:
Adapter TP Link WN722n was used as its wireless interface this
was chosen as it has been well documented as wireless adapter 1. Device Assembly
for the Raspberry Pi.
This phase is done by setting up the Raspberr Pi boards and
other supporting devices such as wireless adapter, and Noobs
TABLE I. LISF OF HARDWARE FOR ONE NODE SD Card with pre-installed Raspbian,
Device Description 2. OLSR package installation
A board that manages the entire
Raspberry Pi 3 (1.2GHz 64-bit In this phase package olsrd was installed using the command
activity; acts as a mesh node and
quad-core ARMv8 CPU, 1GB
sensor node substitute.
RAM, 4 USB ports, 40 GPIO pins) Sudo apt-get install olsrd
Acts as a signal transmitter
Wireless adapter (TP and receiver so one node
3. Iperf package installation
Link WN722N) can interact with another In this package iperf was installed using the command
node.
Noobs SD card (4 GB) As a storage for software Sudo apt-get install iperf
4. Configuration
Figure 1 the internal board of the Raspberry Pi3, and Figure 2
shows the Raspberry Pi 3 assembled with the wireless adapter In this step the Raspberry Pi devices were configured
attachment as used in [9]. The adapter was added for longer for mesh networking by editing the /etc/network/interfaces
reach and more stable connection. file to set the wireless adapter to be on the same network,
ssid, and channel, and to be in adhoc mode [9]. For the

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2017 International Conference on Signals and Systems (ICSigSys)
experiment the network address was set to 192.168.10.0, the
network ssid was set “meshkit”, and the channel was set to
channel 6 so that all mesh nodes will lie on the same network
and be able to communicate with each other.
Lastly to run olsrd in the device the command: sudo olsrd -
I wlan1 -d 2 was used.
Figure 3. OLSRD debug level 2 running on Raspberry Pi 3
B. Experimental Scenarios
The first scenario consisted of two nodes to show one
hop, one flow of data. The second scenario consisted of three
nodes to show two hop, two flow of data. The third scenario
consisted of five nodes to test up to four hops, one flow of
data.
1. one hop, one flow scenario
Figure 4 shows the Raspberry Pi Placement for a one
hop, one flow scenario. Raspberry Pi 1 (R1) was placed in
a room with walls to shorten the transmission range for the
nodes.
Figure 4. Raspberry Pi Placement for one hop, one
flow scenario.
For this test R1 was used as the iperf server through the
command “iperf -s”. R2 then sends a stream of packets using
the iperf tool acting as a client for 10 seconds then measuring
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R2 and R1’s throughput using the command “iperf -c
192.168.10.1xx -t 10”. This was replicated for 20 times.
2. two-hop, two-flow scenario
The topology used for measuring the throughput of a two
hop, two flow scenario can be seen in Figure 5 below. It shows
the floor plan of the building and placement of the mesh nodes
in the two-hop, two-flow network scenario.
Figure 5. Topology for two hop, two flow scenario
For the test TCP was also used like the one hop one flow
scenario. The payload was also 28kb for each iteration.
For the test R1 was used as the iperf server using command”
iperf -s ”. R2 then sends a stream of packets using the iperf tool
acting as a client for 10 seconds with the command “iperf -c
192.168.10.1xx -t 10” while R3 is also sending indefinitely with
the command “iperf -c 192.168.10.1xx -t 10000”. The throughput
between R2 and R1 is then measured. This was replicated for 20
times. This is again repeated only R2 is the one sending
indefinitely, R3 is sending for 10 seconds, and the throughput
between R3 and R1 is measured instead. A single flow two hop
scenario was also done with this configuration using R3 as the
client and R1 as the server for reference.
3. UDP and TCP Iperf tests for multiple hops
For this scenario five similarly configured Raspberry Pi’s
were used to test the throughput for each number of hops. The
raspberry pi’s were placed 60 m away from each other with one
raspberry pi acting as a udp server. This test was done in the
Track Oval of the Central Luzon State University. Due to the
lack of outlets the raspberry pi’s were powered using
powerbanks and controlled via ssh by a laptop. Figure 6 shows
the experimental set up.
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Figure 6. Set up of Multiple Hop Network
Scenario
The steps to measure the throughput for each hop in the
set up was similar to that of scenario 1. The raspberry pi’s sent
a payload of 54Mbps over the network with UDP buffer size of
160kb and sending 1470 byte datagrams for 10 seconds. For the
TCP test a tcp window size of 43.8 kb was used.
IV. RESULTS AND DISCUSSION
This section describes how the results of the two scenarios
were analyzed and compared.
A. Testing of one hop, one flow scenarios
After testing bandwidth or the throughput of the connection was
obtained. Figure 1 shows a sample Iperf TCP test.
Figure 7. Sample output of Iperf test.
For the one hop, one flow scenario we obtained an average of
11.1 Mbps. Considering the maximum throughput of wireless
networks of 240 kilobits per second [18], this throughput is
more than enough to transfer this kind of data sizes. Another
application could be wireless personal area networks (WPAN)
[4]. The Raspberry pi is a small device and can be used as a
more powerful alternative WPAN device for wireless sensor
network.
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B. Testing of two hop two flow scenarios
For the two hop two flow scenario we obtained an average
throughput of 10.1 Mbps for R2 and an average throughput of .5
Mbps for R3, a big drop from the 5.7 Mbps for a two hop, single
flow scenario for R3. Although the throughput of the two hop
node in the multiflow scenario is lower, the throughput is still
way above the maximum throughput of a WPAN[18].
C. Testing of multihop scenarios
In previous studies [8] the drop in throughput have been
attributed to resource constraints of the Raspberry Pi. The next
section discusses how this is an incomplete explanation of the
phenomenon. A more accurate model for the drop is the
throughput degradation that is observed in all mobile ad hoc
network with multiple hops as is shown in the next scenario.
The throughput for each of the number of hops using UDP
and TCP were plotted and graphed as shown in Figure 8. The
graph shows a similar model as that observed in previous
studies[9][10] showing that throughput degradation is also
present and behaves similarly in the raspberry pi. Showing that
the drop in throughput is just a characteristic of a Mobile Ad hoc
networks and not a limitation of the Raspberry Pi.
Figure 6. Set up of Multiple Hop Network
Scenario
D. Analysing and Comparing the results from the two
scenarios
The results from the two scenarios were then compared to
find out if the throughput of the whole network was the same
for both scenarios. This was done by adding the throughput of
the two raspberry pi’s using the formula
Throughput R3*2 + Throughput R2 = multi-hop, multi-
flow Throughput
R3’s throughput was multiplied by 2 to account for
throughput degradation which is present in OLSRD manet
networks. Multiplier for throughput degradation is computed as
1/N where N= number of hops.
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2017 International Conference on Signals and Systems (ICSigSys)
T-Test is then applied to the multi-hop, multi-flow throughput This work has been supported by the Bayanihanets Research
for scenario 2 and single hop, single flow throughput for Program, funded by the Department of Science and
scenario 1 to test for difference. A t-value of 0.32 was obtained Technology(DOST), and Central Luzon State University,
showing that the , multi-flow throughput for scenario 2 and Republic of the Philippines
single hop, single flow throughput is not significantly different.
A more general equation for computing the additive
throughput or describing the scenario is:
[1]
∑ ℎ ℎ ∗ ℎ =multi-hop, multi- [2]
flow throughput
Where n is equal to the number of data flows used, and i is
referring to the dataflow. Adding the throughput for each [3]
dataflow i multiplied by the number of hops traversed by
dataflow i will get you the additive throughput for the scenario.
At least for two hop two data flow scenario this additive
throughput is the similar or at least not significantly different to
the one hop one data flow throughput scenario using the same [4]
set up. [5]
[6]
V. CONCLUSION [7]
From the data obtained using throughputs of the first two
scenarios, and the analysis and comparison of the results from
the two scenarios, it can be concluded that there is no decrease
in network performance for the whole network as opposed to [8]
what has been reported in the literature [8]. The aggregate
throughput for the one hop connection is the same regardless of [9]
one flow or two flow of data. The large drop of throughput in
two flow, two hop is then attributed to the resource constraints [10]
and scheduling of the Raspberry Pi 3, R2 the intermediary node
[11]
prioritizing one stream to finish over another. Even with this
constraint however the throughput obtained in the end node is [12]
still sufficient for wireless sensor network purposes currently
has a maximum theoretical throughput of 225kbps [13]
(802.15.4)[18] which is still smaller than a four hop throughput [14]
of 2000kbps. [15]
The paper only tested with a stream of data generated using
Iperf network testing tool. Future works should try to test this [16]
using the Raspberry Pi3 as an actual sensor node and router
node in one. Implementing this also in a full mesh network
[17]
would show full mesh capabilities of the device in a wireless
[18]
sensor network. Other metrics and routing algorithms as well
could be explored
[19]
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ACKNOWLEDGMENT
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