Dynamic Duty Cycle Adaptation to Real-Time Data in IEEE 802.15.4 Based WSN

The IEEE 802.15.4 standard employs the periodic listen and sleep mechanism for supporting low power consumption. However, such a mechanism can cause long packet delay which makes it difficult to support the successful transmission of real-time data in time. In this paper, we present a new algorithm that adapts the duty cycle to the existence and status of real-time data in the IEEE 802.15.4 based WSN, in order to reduce the packet delay of real-time data and support time-bounded delivery of real-time data. By checking the existence and status of real-time data in the message queue of each device, the device determines whether it has to change the duty cycle. Through ns-2 simulation, we have shown that the network performance becomes better.