Optimal Beacon Scheduling Scheme for Cluster-Tree WPANs

This paper presents an optimal beacon scheduling scheme using power control in cluster-tree network. A cluster-tree network conforming to the IEEE 802.15.4 standard is formed by several coordinators that periodically send beacon frames to the nodes of their cluster. However, if these periodic beacon frames are sent without any particular scheduling, they will collide with each other and those nodes that wait for them will lose synchronization with their coordinators. The purpose of this paper is to overcome this problem by proposing an optimal beacon scheduling scheme using power control, cluster grouping, and the group identifier (GID) in cluster-tree WPANs. In order to verify the performance of proposed scheme, we evaluated the performance of our scheme through a series of simulations using the Network Simulator 2 (NS-2).