Enhancing IEEE 802.15.4 for low-latency, bandwidth, and energy critical WSN applications

The recently standardized IEEE 802.15.4 protocol is emerging as a basic building block for wireless sensor network applications by providing many appealing features, such as low power, low cost, low data-rate, and simplicity. However, when treating applications with strict timeliness, energy, and bandwidth requirements several problems arise, triggering the need of a solution for an efficient twinning of IEEE 802.15.4 and wireless sensor networks. In this paper, after discussing the working of IEEE 802.15.4, we point out its limitations for such applications and propose a solution to overcome those limitations. We also derive an efficient IEEE 802.15.4-based network parameters setting to improve the network performance in terms of latency, energy, and bandwidth utilization.