A study on IEEE 802.15.4e compliant low-power multi-hop SUN with frame aggregation

This paper proposes a low-power multi-hop data frame transmission scheme to create a long-lived smart utility network (SUN), as standardized by IEEE 802.15 TG4g/4e. In the proposed scheme, low energy superframe structure with turned-off beacons are employed to reduce power wastage, thereby providing effective sleep periods for each device. Moreover, multi-hop frame transmission is easily realized by constructing a tree-shaped topology with incoming and outgoing superframes. Furthermore, in the proposed system, effective frame aggregation technology exploiting such low energy superframe structure is employed in order to solve the bottle neck problems that seriously degrade utility data collection performance in SUN. The results of computer simulations confirm that the proposed scheme enables a greater than 90% frame success rate without error control while holding a less than 0.4% active period ratio in feasible SUN usage situations.