Ultra-Low-Power Optimizations for the IEEE 802.15.4 Networking Protocol

IEEE 802.15.4 is a recent low-rate/low-power standard for wireless personal area and sensor networks. Its simple infrastructure, intermediate range and reasonable power performance make it a candidate for a wide range of applications that require a low throughput but a reasonable device lifetime and consequently a certain power efficiency. Anyway there are some main inefficiencies of the protocol that limit its power performance and cause unnecessary power waste in some situations. In this paper these limitations of the standard in terms of power performance are investigated. Possible optimizations that can be achieved with minimal or null changes on available 802.15.4 compliant hardware platforms are suggested. We use our modeling technique and our simulator validated for 802.15.4 in to provide a complete evaluation of proposed optimizations.