Performance Enhancement in a Low Rate Wireless PAN

The low rate wireless personal network (LR-WPAN) is a new standard uniquely designed for low data rates and low energy consumption. Each device has a limited energy supply and generates information that needs to be communicated to a sink node, but traffic generation from the network device may depend on the sensor type. Some sensors generate information regularly, but other sensors may generate information in an event-driven manner. Consequently, a static contention access period is not desirable for event-driven information because it cannot cope well with the variations of network traffic volume and patterns. In this paper, we suggest a new traffic adaptation scheduling mechanism that is based on the network traffic volume and pattern. The PAN coordinator can configure its beacon order (BO) and superframe order (SO) parameters based on the channel contention situation and broadcast a beacon message including a new SO and BO at every beacon interval (BI). Therefore, we will allow a network device to access the channel more frequently according to the traffic model. We will show the improvement of the throughput, the energy efficiency, and the end-to-end delay. The performance enhancement will be confirmed by the network simulation (NS-2) results.