Performance of IEEE 802.15.4 Clusters with Power Management and Key Exchange

Abstract

The IEEE 802.15.4 specification is a recent low data rate wireless personal area network standard. While basic security services are provided for, there is a lack of more advanced techniques which are indispensable in modern personal area network applications. In addition, performance implications of those services are not known. In this paper, we describe a secure data exchange protocol based on the ZigBee specification and built on top of IEEE 802.15.4 link layer. This protocol includes a key exchange mechanism. We assume that all nodes are applying power management technique based on the constant event sensing reliability required by the coordinator. Power management generates random sleep times by every node which in average fairly distributes the sensing load among the nodes. Key exchange is initiated by a cluster coordinator after some given number of sensing packets have been received by the coordinator. We develop and integrate simulation model of the key exchange and power management technique into the cluster’s reliable sensing function. We evaluate the impact of security function and its periodicity on cluster performance.