Header compression scheme for IEEE 802.15.5

IEEE 802.15.5 is the first official standard to enable meshing communications over IEEE 802.15.4 Low-Rate low-power Wireless Personal Area Networks (LR-WPANs). The use of mesh technology can reduce energy usage in distributed networks, and enhance reliability through route redundancy; however, the additional header required adds overhead to the packet and increases both the energy requirements and transmission times of the packets. This overhead can be minimized using header compression. This paper proposes a compression scheme for the IEEE802.15.5 headers and evaluates the benefits of the proposed scheme: it is shown that the throughput can be increased by up to 15%, while energy consumption can be reduced by approximately 30% compared to the use of the existing 802.15.5 header.