A Holistic Approach to Optimizing the Lifetime of IEEE 802.15.4/ZigBee Networks with a Deterministic Guarantee of Real-Time Flows

IEEE 802.15.4 is a global standard designed for emerging applications in low-rate wireless personal area networks (LRWPANs). The standard provides beneficial features, such as a beacon-enabled mode and guaranteed time slots for realtime data delivery. However, how to optimally operate those features is still an open issue. For the optimal operation of the features, this paper proposes a holistic optimization method that jointly optimizes three cross-related problems: cluster-tree construction, nodes’ power configuration, and duty-cycle scheduling. Our holistic optimization method provides a solution for those problems so that all the real-time packets can be delivered within their deadlines in the most energyefficient way. Our simulation study shows that compared to existing methods, our holistic optimization can guarantee the on-time delivery of all real-time packets while significantly saving energy, consequently, significantly increasing the lifetime of the network. Furthermore, we show that our holistic optimization can be extended to take advantage of the spatial reuse of a radio frequency resource among long distance nodes and, hence, significantly increase the entire network capacity. Category: Ubiquitous computing