An incrementally deployable energy efficient 802.15.4 MAC protocol (DEEP)

The IEEE 802.15.4 is a standard that specifies the physical layer and media access control for low data rate wireless personal area networks (WPANs). The standard is intended to provide connectivity to mobile devices with storage, energy, and communication constraints that can be used in many industrial, military and civilian application areas. These mobile devices (usually sensors) and actuators are equipped with a radio transceiver, a microcontroller, and a source of energy which is usually a battery. In order to extend the lifetime of a WPAN using the beacon-enabled 802.15.4 standard, we propose an incrementally deployable and energy efficient 802.15.4 MAC protocol (DEEP) for beacon-enabled sensor networks. The implementation of our protocol requires modifications to the superframe guaranteed time slot (GTS) distribution mechanism to reduce energy consumption in the network by reducing the size of broadcast beacons. We implement DEEP through simulations and also using real sensors. For the simulations, we implemented our protocol using Omnet++, and tinyOS and the nesC language were used for the experiments. Our results show that DEEP reduces energy consumption up to nearly 50% when seven devices allocate guaranteed time slots descriptors during normal communication. We also show that DEEP is backward compatible and can be incrementally deployed to extend the lifetime of the network: a partial deployment of DEEP leads to proportional improvements in the network energy savings.