A Distributed and Autonomous Beacon Scheduling Algorithm for IEEE 802.15.4/ZigBee Networks
Ralf Burda, Christian Wietfeld · 2007
The need for high reliability wireless communication has triggered the interest in mesh networks recently. Even though IEEE 802.15.4/ZigBee offers basic meshing capabilities, it still lacks tight synchronization of the whole network by means of beacons in this topology mode. However, the goal of an energy efficient operation requires a close synchronization for effective duty cycle management. Beacon scheduling mechanisms for the cluster-tree topology on centralized basis are known, but extensions to meshing have not been defined. Therefore, this paper introduces a distributed beacon scheduling (DBS) algorithm to overcome this deficiency while addressing robustness and performance during reconfiguration, too. The results show the applicability of the approach by extensive simulations even for large networks of several thousand nodes in wireless mesh networks (WMNs) based on IEEE 802.15.4/ZigBee.