E-BOP: A simple and efficient enhancement of ZigBee´s BOP protocol

In this paper, we present a duty-cycle MAC protocol for cluster-tree wireless sensor networks which takes advantages of desirable features of synchronous and asynchronous duty-cycle schemes. The proposed protocol deploys ZigBee beacon-only period (BOP) approach to address beacon collision problem and enhances its performance by 1) introducing an overhead-free asynchronous adaptive duty-cycle scheduling scheme and 2) separating beacon interval and duty-cycle length, in order to improving energy efficiency and reliability and alleviating packet delivery latency, respectively. As confirmed by simulation results, the proposed scheme significantly enhances performance of BOP protocol, without incurring any additional protocol overhead.