Amendments to the IEEE 802.15.4 Protocol

This chapter presents specific amendments to the IEEE 802.15.4, so that some of the open issues that have been previously identified. In particular, a new implicit GTS allocation mechanism (i-GAME) is proposed that over performs the default one. Then, a node grouping mechanism (H-NAMe) is proposed so that the hidden nodes problem is mitigated and consequently energy-efficiency, throughput and latency are improved. Also, we present a very simple mechanism to exploit differentiate the traffic based on multiple priority. Finally, an overview of several improvements affecting the security and privacy of the messages against external attacks and spoofing is presented. Importantly, all these mechanisms have been implemented and integrated in the 15.4 protocol stack and experimentally validated.