Superframe Duration Allocation Schemes to Improve the Throughput of Cluster-Tree Wireless Sensor Networks

The use of Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) technologies is an attractive option to support wide-scale monitoring applications, such as the ones that can be found in precision agriculture, environmental monitoring and industrial automation. The IEEE 802.15.4/ZigBee cluster-tree topology is a suitable t...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Sensors (Basel, Switzerland) Vol. 17; no. 2; p. 249
Main Authors: Leão, Erico, Montez, Carlos, Moraes, Ricardo, Portugal, Paulo, Vasques, Francisco
Format: Journal Article
Language:English
Published: Switzerland MDPI AG 27.01.2017
MDPI
Subjects:
Allocations
buffer overflow
cluster-tree
Congestion
Environmental monitoring
IEEE 802.15.4
Messages
Networks
Remote sensors
superframe duration
Time measurements
wide-scale, allocation scheme
Wireless networks
ZigBee
ZigBee
cluster-tree
IEEE 802.15.4
congestion
wide-scale, allocation scheme
superframe duration
buffer overflow
ISSN:1424-8220, 1424-8220
Online Access:Get full text
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Summary:The use of Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) technologies is an attractive option to support wide-scale monitoring applications, such as the ones that can be found in precision agriculture, environmental monitoring and industrial automation. The IEEE 802.15.4/ZigBee cluster-tree topology is a suitable topology to build wide-scale WSNs. Despite some of its known advantages, including timing synchronisation and duty-cycle operation, cluster-tree networks may suffer from severe network congestion problems due to the convergecast pattern of its communication traffic. Therefore, the careful adjustment of transmission opportunities (superframe durations) allocated to the cluster-heads is an important research issue. This paper proposes a set of proportional Superframe Duration Allocation (SDA) schemes, based on well-defined protocol and timing models, and on the message load imposed by child nodes (Load-SDA scheme), or by number of descendant nodes (Nodes-SDA scheme) of each cluster-head. The underlying reasoning is to adequately allocate transmission opportunities (superframe durations) and parametrize buffer sizes, in order to improve the network throughput and avoid typical problems, such as: network congestion, high end-to-end communication delays and discarded messages due to buffer overflows. Simulation assessments show how proposed allocation schemes may clearly improve the operation of wide-scale cluster-tree networks.
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ISSN:1424-8220
1424-8220
DOI:10.3390/s17020249