Enhancements in the Orphan Process for Wireless Personal Area Networks: Real Implementation Scenarios

Wireless personal area networks (WPAN) are wireless sensor networks (WSN) designed for allowing a low-cost, low-power and short-range wireless communication. The IEEE 802.15.4 is the WPAN standard which satisfies these features and facilitates diverse self-configuring operation processes for adapting to different environments and applications. One of these processes is responsible for resolving the loss of coverage of a device, namely an orphan device. It has associated a long procedure when the device has to return to the wireless network, incurring in a high delay and energy consumption. This behavior implies that the Orphan device does not perform its assigned tasks during this delay increasing simultaneously its power consumption. We have designed a new algorithm, called optimized orphan algorithm (OOA), which offers a significant better delay and energy consumption performance. The OOA algorithm is implemented on real devices and evaluated under different scenarios. In this paper, the results obtained are presented and discussed as well.