A Beacon Distribution Scheme for Contention Mitigation Scheme in IEEE 802.15.4 Wireless Sensor Networks

Abstract

Recently, wireless sensor networks are widely used in variety fields such as military, medical services, and so on. As IEEE 802.15.4 having prominent advantages that are the low cost and the low energy consumption, it is suitable to several energy critical applications suffered from limited resources. For this reason, many studies have proposed energy-efficient solutions, however, they may waste energy caused by the frequent packet collisions since they do not consider the contentions in multi-coordinator environments. In response, we proposed a new contention mitigation scheme to enhance the energy efficiency of sensor nodes by reducing the contention level among nearby coordinators. In the proposed scheme, the coordinators exchange their neighbor IDs and superframe schedules with each other based on the collected information. It leads that the coordinators isolate the superframe duration by staggering own beacon transmission. This can mitigate significant contentions among burst packets at the beginning of the superframe thereby reduces a lot of energy consumption for frequent retransmission. Simulation results show that the proposed scheme outperforms existing solutions in terms of energy efficiency as well as throughput for all conditions.