Energy balanced chain in IEEE 802.15.4 low rate WPAN

IEEE 802.15.4 Low Rate Wireless Personal Area Network (LR-WPAN) intends to provide low-power ubiquitous communications between devices. However, energy utilization by devices (or nodes) in the network often impacts the application functionality and lifetime due to limited battery capacity. For instance, in the typical multihop LR-WPAN used for data detection and monitoring, the traffic flow often converges to the data sink and such a many-to-one pattern typically results in energy imbalance. Previous research has proposed many approaches to solve this issue. However, a common limitation is about using the idealized energy model, such as “first order radio model”, which is the idealized estimation for RF transmission energy cost of the node. In this paper, we develop a realistic and representative LR-WPAN RF transceiver energy model from the measured data on Chipcon CC2420 and corresponding power control policy. Further, with this energy model, we formulate an optimized energy balanced chain (OEBC) model to maximize the network lifetime. Finally, the OEBC model is applied to develop the network deployment strategy by optimizing node placement, node density and traffic flow distribution.