Traffic adaptive backoff for inter-cluster communications in IEEE802.15.4 cluster-based wireless sensor networks with spatial non-uniform traffic

The difference in transmission performance arises among child cluster heads (CCHs) on inter-cluster communications in cluster-based wireless sensor networks (WSNs) with spatial non-uniform traffic because several CCHs with different traffic loads communicate to their parent cluster head on shared communication channel. Against this problem this paper proposes traffic adaptive backoff control mechanism to mitigate this performance difference. The proposed mechanism performs autonomous priority control by adjusting backoff exponent (BE) which is one of typical control parameters for backoff control in slotted CSMA/CA access. Performance evaluations by computer simulation show the proposed mechanism mitigates the performance difference among the CCHs with different traffic loads under spatial non-uniform traffic conditions.