Bursty-Contention Distribution for Energy Efficiency in Large Scale IEEE 802.15.4 Wireless Sensor Networks

Abstract

Wireless sensor networks are becoming the most popular technology as the paradigm of Internet of Things is emerging recently. Since IEEE 802.15.4, suitable for wireless sensor networks, has the prominent advantages such as the low cost and low energy consumption, it is helpful for variety fields that are sources of Internet of Things. They include healthcare monitoring, industrial application, smart grid, home automation, and many energy-critical application suffered from limited resources. In response, many studies have proposed energy efficient solutions, however, they may waste energy as ever. It is because they do not consider the contentions in multi-coordinator environments then the frequent packet collisions are followed by retransmission which consumed unnecessary energy. In this respect, we proposed a new and simply implementable contention mitigation scheme to enhance the energy efficiency of sensor nodes by reducing the contention degree among neighboring coordinators. In the proposed scheme, the coordinators recognize the network state by exchanging their information with each other. It leads that the coordinators isolate the superframe duration by staggering own beacon transmission. It can alleviate significant contentions among burst packets at the beginning of the superframe. Therefore, the proposed scheme reduces a lot of unnecessary wasted energy in the process of redundant retransmission. Simulation results show that the proposed scheme outperforms existing energy efficient solutions with regard to the network performance.