Title: Collision-free multichannel superframe scheduling for IEEE 802.15.4 cluster-tree networks

Authors: Xi Jin; Qiong Zhang; Peng Zeng; Fanxin Kong; Yang Xiao

Addresses: Lab. of Networked Control Systems, Shenyang Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences, 114 Nanta Street, Shenhe District, Shenyang, Liaoning Province 110016, China ' Lab. of Networked Control Systems, Shenyang Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences, 114 Nanta Street, Shenhe District, Shenyang, Liaoning Province 110016, China ' Lab. of Networked Control Systems, Shenyang Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences, 114 Nanta Street, Shenhe District, Shenyang, Liaoning Province 110016, China ' School of Computer Science, McGill University, 3480 University Street, Montreal, Quebec, Canada H3A 0E9 ' Department of Computer Science, The University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa, AL 35487-0290, USA

Abstract: The beacon-enabled mode is effective in improving real-time performance of wireless sensor networks (WSNs). Keeping cluster heads and members synchronised in cluster-tree networks becomes challenging in presence of beacon collisions. In this paper, we study a collision-free multichannel superframe scheduling problem. We first formulate this problem in the satisfiability modulo theories (SMT) specification. It can be solved by an SMT solver but with limited scalability. Then, we present two more efficient approaches. Our results show that the proposed approaches can significantly improve the schedulability of superframes compared to the existing approach. Finally, we implement a real system based on a wireless network for industrial automation-process automation (WIA-PA) network to show the feasibility of our proposal.

Keywords: WSNs; wireless sensor networks; cluster-tree networks; beacon-enabled mode; beacon collisions; superframe scheduling; collision avoidance; IEEE 802.15.4; multichannel superframes.

DOI: 10.1504/IJSNET.2014.064435

International Journal of Sensor Networks, 2014 Vol.15 No.4, pp.246 - 258

Received: 30 Oct 2013
Accepted: 12 Mar 2014
Published online: 25 Aug 2014 *

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