Energy efficiency is one of the critical issues for Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN). IEEE 802.15.4 beacon-enabled MAC protocol achieves low energy consumption by having periodical inactive portions, where nodes run in low power. However, IEEE 802.15.4 beacon-enabled protocol cannot respond to dynamic changes in the number of sensor nodes and data rates in WSN because its duty cycle is fixed and immutable. In this paper, we propose a dynamic superframe duration adaptation scheme based on the Markov chain-based analysis methods for IEEE 802.15.4 beacon-enabled protocol. The proposed methods are flexible enough to accommodate changes in the number of sensor nodes and differences in data rates in WSNs while maintaining low latency and low energy consumption despite slight degradation in packet delivery ratio.

In this paper, the world's first experimental evaluation of the Wi-SUN Japan Utility Telemetering Association (JUTA) profile-compliant feathery receiver-initiated transmission (JUTA F-RIT) protocol is conducted. Firstly, the transmission success rate in an interference environment is evaluated by theoretical analysis and computer simulations. The analysis is derived from the interference model focusing on the carrier sense. The analysis and simulation results agree as regards the transmission success rate of the JUTA F-RIT protocol. Secondly, we develop the dongle-type prototype that hosts the JUTA F-RIT protocol. Measurement results in a cochannel interference environment show that the transmission success rate at the lower MAC layer is around 94% when the number of terminals is 20. When the waiting time for the establishment of the communication link can be extended to exceed 10 s, the JUTA F-RIT protocol can achieve the transmission success rate of over 90% without the re-establishment of the communication link and re-transmission of data frames. Moreover, the experimental results are examined from two viewpoints of the performance of the frame transmissions and the timeout incident, and the feature of the JUTA F-RIT protocol are discussed.

In this paper, an enhanced feathery receiver initiated transmission (eF-RIT) protocol is proposed for wireless smart utility network (Wi-SUN) systems with high traffic bi-directional communications such as emergency gas automatic meter infrastructure (AMI) cases. Firstly, we evaluate the conventional F-RIT protocol by simulation and experiment. The measurement results show that the IEEE 802.15.4e compliant conventional F-RIT protocol can achieve over 90% transmission success rates under the practical AMI specified conditions. However, the transmission success rates decline in high traffic environments. Detailed analyses indicate the degradation of the performance is caused by the timeout problem which occurs when the destination terminal is in the wait duration of the data transmission, and so does not transmit an RIT data request frame. To overcome this problem, we propose the eF-RIT protocol that suppresses the frequency of timeout occurrence. The proposed eF-RIT protocol is also evaluated by simulation and experiment. The evaluation results indicate that the proposed eF-RIT protocol reduces the incident of timeout by up to 31%, and achieves transmission success rates as high as 90% when the data generation rate is 1.0×10-2s-1.

A simple and novel multiple-symbol differential detection (MSDD) scheme is proposed for IEEE 802.15.4 binary phase shift keying (BPSK) receivers. The detection is initiated by estimating and compensating the carrier frequency offset (CFO) effect in the chip sample of interest. With these new statistics, the decisions are jointly made by allowing the observation window length to be longer than two bit intervals. Simulation results demonstrate that detection reliability of the IEEE 802.15.4 BPSK receivers is significantly improved. Namely, at packet error rate (PER) of 1×10-3, the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) gap between ideal coherent detection (perfect carrier reference phase and no CFO) with differential decoding and conventional optimal single differential coherent detection (SDCD) is filled by 2.1dB when the observation window length is set to 6bit intervals. Then, the benefit that less energy consumed by retransmissions is successfully achieved.

In this paper, we propose an IEEE 802.15.10-based layer 2 routing (L2R) method with a load balancing algorithm; the proposal considers fairness in terms of the cumulative number of sending packets at each terminal to resolve the packet concentration problem for the IEEE 802.15.4-based low-power consumption wireless smart utility network (Wi-SUN) systems. The proposal uses the accumulated sending times of each terminal as a weight in calculating each path quality metric (PQM) to decide multi-hopping routes with load balancing in the network. Computer simulation of the mesh network with 256 terminals shows that the proposed routing method can improve the maximum sending ratio (MSR), defined as the ratio of the maximum sending times to the average number of sending times in the network, by 56% with no degradation of the end-to-end communication success ratio (E2E-SR). The proposed algorithm is also experimentally evaluated by using actual Wi-SUN modules. The proposed routing method also improves the MSR by 84% with 70 terminals. Computer simulations and experiments prove the effectiveness of the proposed method in terms of load balancing.

Concurrent transmission (CT) is a revolutionary multi-hop protocol that significantly improves the MAC- and network-layer efficiency by allowing synchronized packet collisions. Although its superiority has been empirically verified, there is still a lack of studies on how the receiver survives such packet collisions, particularly in the presence of the carrier frequency offsets (CFO) between the transmitters. This work rectifies this omission by providing a comprehensive evaluation of the physical-layer receiver performance under CT, and a theoretical analysis on the fading duration of the beating effect resulting from the CFO. The main findings from our evaluations are the following points. (1) Beating significantly affects the receiver performance, and an error correcting mechanism is needed to combat the beating. (2) In IEEE 802.15.4 systems, the direct sequence spread spectrum (DSSS) plays such a role in combatting the beating. (3) However, due to the limited length of DSSS, the receiver still suffers from the beating if the fading duration is too long. (4) On the other hand, the basic M-ary FSK mode of IEEE 802.15.4g is vulnerable to CT due to the lack of error correcting mechanism. In view of the importance of the fading duration, we further theoretically derive the closed form of the average fading duration (AFD) of the beating under CT in terms of the transmitter number and the standard deviation of the CFO. Moreover, we prove that the receiver performance can be improved by having higher CFO deviations between the transmitters due to the shorter AFD. Finally, we estimate the AFD in the real system by actually measuring the CFO of a large number of sensor nodes.

The IEEE 802.15.4 standard enables a short range, low data rate and low power communication between devices in wireless sensor networks (WSNs). In IEEE 802.15.4, a slotted carrier sensing multiple access with collision avoidance (CSMA/CA) algorithm is employed to coordinate a large number of sensor devices. Unlike IEEE 802.11 wireless LAN (WLAN), energy consumption requirements enable it to use fewer number of backoffs, which adversely increase collisions, resulting in degradation of energy consumption. In this letter, we devise an adaptive backoff scheme in WSN whose backoff range is adjusted depending on the contention level, and present its Markov model for mathematical analysis. The proposed scheme is analyzed and its efficiency is validated by ns-2 simulation in respect to network throughput and energy consumption. Its performance is also compared with the standard and previous works, showing that it outperforms them for a whole range of arrival rate.

This paper summarizes Wi-SUN communication systems and their physical (PHY) layer and media access control (MAC) specifications. Firstly, the Wi-SUN communication systems are categorized into three. The key PHY and MAC standards, IEEE 802.15.4g and .4e, that configure the systems are explained, and fundamental transmission performances of the systems in the PHY layer and MAC layer are evaluated by computer simulations. Then, the Wi-SUN alliance and the Wi-SUN profiles that include IEEE 802.15.4g and .4e are explained. Finally, to understand the transmission performance of actual IEEE 802.15.4g Wi-SUN radio devices, PER performances under AWGN and multipath fading environments are measured by using IEEE 802.15.4g compliant and Wi-SUN alliance certified radio modules. This paper is an instruction paper for the beginners of the Wi-SUN based communications systems.

In this paper, we propose an utilization-aware hybrid beacon scheduling method for a large-scale IEEE 802.15.4 cluster-tree ZigBee network. The proposed method aims to enhance schedulability of a target network by better utilizing transmission medium, while avoiding inter-cluster collisions at the same time. To achieve this goal, the proposed scheduling method partially allows beacon overlaps, if appropriate. In particular, this paper answers for the following questions: 1) on which condition clusters can send overlapped beacons, 2) how to select clusters to overlap with minimizing utilization, and 3) how to adjust beacon parameters for grouped clusters. Also, we quantitatively evaluate the proposed method compared to previous works — i.e., non-beacon scheduling and a serialized beacon scheduling algorithm — from several aspects including total duty cycles, packet drop rate, and end-to-end delay.

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) have been proposed for monitoring vital signs of patients at home. This scenario requires inter-cell mobility; however, WSNs are not designed to support this characteristic. In this paper we propose a cross-layer protocol to manage the handoff, called WSN-HaDaS (Handoff aware of Data Sending), which operates in the transport layer and medium access control (MAC) sub-layer based on an interaction between the layers (transport and MAC). This protocol interacts with a sending data mechanism (like TCP protocol) to notify the beginning or ending of the handoff process; therefore, the mechanism can stop or resume data sending, respectively. Therefore, WSN-HaDaS prevents packet loss during the handoff process. WSN-HaDaS comprises two main processes to manage mobility: Monitoring Handoff Trigger (MHT) and Handoff Execution Process (HEP); they are responsible for generating the handoff warning messages and executing the handoff process, respectively. Therefore, MHT delay and HEP delay are used as the key performance metrics. To evaluate the proposal, we use a physical test-bed in an indoor environment with the intention of obtaining practical results. The results demonstrate that the proposed protocol performs the handoff process with less delay than the selected reference work. They also show that WSN-HaDaS is an appropriate solution to provide inter-cell mobility in WSNs. Furthermore, we demonstrate the possibility of embedding the WSN-HaDaS in devices with limited resources using the IEEE 802.1.5.4 standard.

The problem of coexistence between IEEE 802.11g based wireless LANs (WLANs) and IEEE 802.15.4 based wireless personal area networks (WPANs) in the 2.4GHz band is an important issue for the operation of a home energy management system (HEMS) for smart grids. This paper proposes a coexistence scheme that is called a Hybrid station aided coexistence (HYSAC) scheme to solve this problem. This scheme employs a hybrid-station (H-STA) that possesses two types of network device functions. The scheme improves the data transmission quality of the WPAN devices which transmit energy management information such as power consumption. The proposed HYSAC scheme employs WLAN control frames, which are used to assign WPAN system traffic resources. Moreover, we propose a coexistence method to achieve excellent WLAN throughput where multiple WPANs coexist with a WLAN. We theoretically derive the performance of the proposed scheme by considering the QoS support in WLAN and show that the results of the simulation and theoretical analysis are in good agreement. The numerical results show that the HYSAC scheme decreases the beacon loss rate of WPAN to less than 1% when the WLAN system consists of 10 STAs under saturated traffic conditions. Furthermore, the WLAN throughput of the proposed synchronization method is shown to be 30.6% higher than that of the HYSAC scheme without synchronization when the WLAN that consists of 10 STAs coexists with four WPANs.

In this paper, we propose a novel energy-efficient sensor device management scheme called sensor device personalization (SDP) for the Internet of things (IoT) and wireless sensor networks (WSNs) based on the IEEE 802.15.4 unslotted carrier sense multiple access with collision avoidance (CSMA/CA). In the IoT and WSNs with the star topology, a coordinator device (CD), user devices (UDs), and sensor devices (SDs) compose a network, and the UDs such as smart phones and tablet PCs manage the SDs, which consist of various sensors and communication modules, e.g., smart fridge, robot cleaner, heating and cooling system, and so on, through the CD. Thus, the CD consumes a lot of energy to relay packets between the UDs and the SDs and also has a longer packet transmission delay. Therefore, in order to reduce the energy consumption and packet transmission delay, in the proposed SDP scheme, the UDs obtain a list of SD profiles (including SDs' address information) that the UDs want to manage from the CD, and then the UDs and the SDs directly exchange control messages using the addresses of the SDs. Through analytical models, we show that the proposed SDP scheme outperforms the conventional scheme in terms of normalized throughput, packet transmission delay, packet loss probability, and total energy consumption.

Providing diverse Quality of Service (QoS) with ultra-low power consumption and support of mobility is the most important and challenging issue in wireless body area networks (WBANs). The IEEE 802.15.4 standard exhibits a desirable feature for WBAN, but its inability of mobility support makes it insufficient. In this paper, we show what is required for node mobility support and propose two strategies for the support. We observed that the amount of time required for the association process is the key reason IEEE 802.15.4 is unable to handle mobility. In this paper, we present a new fast association technique, which prevents nodes from scanning multiple channels. In the proposed scheme, by scanning just a single channel, a node can learn about all the coordinators working in different channels. The single channel scanning scheme is able to decrease the association time of IEEE 802.15.4 operating in 2.4GHz by 32 times. Furthermore, in this paper, a method to increase the node connectivity time with its coordinator in IEEE 802.15.4 beacon-enabled mode is introduced. The method tries to anticipate whether the node is moving towards or away from the coordinator by analyzing the signal strength of multiple beacons received from the same coordinator. Thus, the connectivity time is increased by choosing the coordinator with good signal strength, but located both furthest from the node and toward the direction which mobile node is moving. Our approach results in significant improvement by reducing the number of times the moving node switches coordinators. Experimental results have verified that our schemes work well in the mobile sensor network environment.

In general, the sensor network has a many-to-one communication architecture wherein each node transmits its data to a sink. This leads the congested nodes to die early and nodes nears the sink suffer from significant traffic concentrations. In this paper, we propose a cross-layer based routing and MAC protocol which is compatible with the IEEE 802.15.4 standard without additional overhead. The key mechanism is to provide dynamic route discovery and route maintenance operations to avoid and mitigate the most congested nodes by monitoring link status such as link delay, buffer occupancy and residential energy. In addition, the proposed protocol also provides a dynamic tuning of BE (Binary Exponent) and frame retransmission opportunities according to the hop distance to the sink node to mitigate funnel effects. We conducted simulations, verifying the performance over existing protocols.

This paper proposes a secure wireless network system required for an ambient information society; it forms a privacy zone wherein terminals can securely communicate secret information using an arbitrary general radio channel. For this system, we introduce a scheme using a side-information from a special node. The information is used as an encryption key so that the detectable region of the key defines a privacy zone. We implement the scheme on the basis of IEEE 802.15.4 and realize the world's first ambient network platform with the above functionality. An experiment and demonstration show the effectiveness of the proposed system.

IEEE 802.15.4 based devices are a key component for mobile and pervasive computing. However, their small dimensions and reduced resources, together with the intrinsic properties of wireless communication, make it difficult to evaluate such networked systems through real-world trials. In this paper we present an emulation testbed intended for the evaluation of IEEE 802.15.4 networked systems. The testbed builds on the generic framework of the wireless network testbed QOMB, and adds IEEE 802.15.4 network, processor and sensing emulation functionality. We validated the testbed through a series of experiments carried out both through real-world trials in a smart home environment, and through emulation experiments on our testbed. Our results show that one can accurately, and in real time, execute IEEE 802.15.4 network applications on our testbed in an emulated environment that reproduces closely the real scenario.

The current version of IEEE 802.15.4 MAC protocol does not support energy-efficient mobility for the low-power device. In this paper, we propose an energy-efficient sleep mode as part of the IEEE 802.15.4 that can conserve energy by considering mobility of mobile sensor devices. The proposed energy-efficient sleep mode dynamically extends the sleep interval if there is no data to transmit from the device or receive from corresponding nodes.

In this letter, a novel association method called ELBA (efficient load balancing association) is proposed for improved load balancing in IEEE 802.15.4-based WSNs (wireless sensor networks). ELBA adds new nodes to the network in an efficient load-balancing manner by exploiting not only RSSI (received signal strength indicator), which is used in the standard, but also traffic-load, the number of allocated GTSs (guaranteed time slots), and the number of parent nodes and child nodes. Simulation results show that ELBA offers better performance in load balancing and preventing congestion.

The IEEE 802.15.4 protocol is considered a promising technology for low-cost low-power wireless personal area networks. Researchers have discussed the feasibility of voice communications over IEEE 802.15.4 networks. To this end, the personal area network (PAN) coordinator allocates guaranteed time slots (GTSs) for voice communications in the beacon-enabled mode of IEEE 802.15.4. Although IEEE 802.15.4 is capable of supporting voice communications by GTS allocation, it is impossible to accommodate voice transmission beyond two hops due to the excessive transmission delay. In this paper, we propose a GTS allocation scheme for bidirectional voice traffic in IEEE 802.15.4 multihop networks. The goal of our proposed scheme is to achieve low end-to-end delay and packet drop ratio without a complex allocation algorithm. Thus, the proposed scheme allocates GTSs to devices for successful completion of voice transmission in a superframe duration. The proposed scheme also considers transceiver switching delay. This is relatively large compared to a time slot due to the low-cost and low-gain antenna designs. We analyze and validate the proposed scheme in terms of average end-to-end delay and packet drop ratio. Our scheme has lower end-to-end delay and packet drop ratio than the basic IEEE 802.15.4 GTS allocation scheme.

A signal model and weighted-average based estimation techniques are proposed to estimate the angle-of-arrival (AOA) parameters of multiple clusters for a low data rate ultrawide band (LR-UWB) based wireless positioning system. The optimal AOA estimation techniques for the LR-UWB wireless positioning system according to the cluster condition are introduced and it is shown that the proposed techniques are superior to the conventional technique from the standpoint of performance.