Simple Autonomous Active Period Selection Technique for Cluster-Based IEEE 802.15.4 Wireless Sensor Networks with Dynamic Network Changes

Abstract

This chapter aims to provide discussions of active period selection technique for the cluster-tree type wireless sensor networks (WSNs) employing traffic adaptive IEEE 802.15.4 beacon enabled mode under dynamic network changes, and proposes an autonomous distributed superframe duration (SD) selection scheme to reduce beacon collisions by using simple control mechanism. The dynamic network changes, including network topology changes and frame structure changes, cause severe beacon collisions in the cluster-tree type WSNs and greatly degrade their system performance. To overcome this problem, the proposed scheme autonomously selects an active SD by using beacon reception power monitoring with distributed fashion and also introduces a beacon status notice from sensor nodes (SNs) to their parent cluster heads (CHs) in order to prevent unnecessary SD selection at CHs. To enhance the system performance, this chapter also applies the traffic adaptive distributed backoff mechanism, previously proposed in our recent work, to the autonomous distributed SD selection scheme and investigates an effect of the distributed backoff to the system performance. The results evaluated by computer simulation show that the proposed scheme can improve the transmission performance while keeping the better power consumption performance in cluster-tree type WSNs under cluster mobility environments.