Distributed Fast Beacon Scheduling for Mesh Networks

Despite its many benefits, the use of the beacon-enabled mode in multi-hop communications has been limited due to beacon collision problems. In addition, although there has been a lot of research on the beacon scheduling for a tree topology, only a few studies have dealt with the beacon scheduling for a mesh network, which enables more reliable communication by maintaining multiple paths. For a beacon enabled mesh network, the IEEE802.15.4e standard, an emerging new standard for enhanced 802.15.4 MAC, more specifically DSME capability provides a concrete specification about a bitmap-based distributed beacon scheduling. However, it still has some limitations and additional problems which can happen during operation. Therefore, in this paper, we introduce a novel beacon scheduling algorithm to construct a scalable, reliable mesh network. The proposed approach manages efficiently beacon slots of neighboring nodes by means of a fixed length of single variable, RINSD, rather than a bitmap, achieves fast network construction via active allocation of devices, and resolves the potential beacon collision. The experimental results demonstrate that the DFBS achieves faster beacon scheduling and is more efficient in memory usage and beacon frame size than 15.4e DSME standard.