A Novel Multi-Beacon Superframe Structure with Greedy GTS Allocation for IEEE 802.15.4 Wireless PANs

In IEEE 802.15.4 beacon-enabled wireless personal area networks (WPANs), the PAN coordinator will periodically broadcast beacon frames to let its associated end devices keep synchronized. One of the benefits in a beacon-enabled WPAN is that end devices can thus turn off their transceiver during the inactive periods to preserve their energy. Another benefit is that the PAN coordinator can allocate contention-free GTSs (guaranteed time slots) for admitted devices. This paper, first pointed out slot size-induced bandwidth waste problem, which is due to the innate defect of the super frame structure. Then the authors propose the novel multi-beacon super frame (MBS) structure to overcome this problem. To demonstrate the power of MBS, we also propose a greedy GTS allocation algorithm. Simulation results reveal that a WPAN using MBS can attain relatively higher bandwidth utilization at the expense of only a small increase of the device´s active period.