Experimental Evaluation of Beacon Scheduling Mechanisms for Multihop IEEE 802.15.4 Wireless Sensor Networks

Recently, several scheduling techniques to enable multihop communications in the beacon enabled mode of the IEEE 802.15.4 standard have been proposed. Using the beacon enabled mode allows node synchronization and hence energy savings which is an important concern in wireless sensor networks (WSNs). However, and to the best of our knowledge, current available scheduling techniques have not been formally compared. This makes it difficult to decide which technique gives a better performance with regard to different WSN scenarios or applications. In this paper, we compare the two most popular methods for beacon enabled multihop IEEE 802.15.4 WSNs for different scenarios and performance parameters. Based on our findings, we propose recommendations for the use of each scheduling technique.