Analysis and Improvement for 802.15.4 Multi-hop Network

IEEE 802.15.4 is a protocol for low-rate wireless personal area networks. It contains two topologies: the star topology and the peer-to-peer topology. It has good performances for the star topology. However, the beacon collisions with other beacons, data or control frames make the multi-hop beacon-enabled mode difficult to be built and maintained. Although nonbeacon-enabled has better performance, it also suffers from the hidden terminal problem, which becomes much more serious in the multi-hop network. So an improved scheme for IEEE 802.15.4 nonbeacon-enabled multi-hop network is discussed. Extensive ns-2 simulations are used to verify the proposed scheme. The results show that the proposed scheme can solve the problem availably and can achieve much better performance than the previous standard.