IEEE 802.15.4: a Federating Communication Protocol for Time-Sensitive Wireless Sensor Networks

摘要

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) have been attracting increasing interests for developing a newgeneration of embedded systems with great potential for many applications such as surveillance,environment monitoring, emergency medical response and home automation. However, thecommunication paradigms in WSNs differ from the ones attributed to traditional wireless networks,triggering the need for new communication protocols. In this context, the recently standardised IEEE802.15.4 protocol presents some potentially interesting features for deployment in wireless sensornetwork applications, such as power-efficiency, timeliness guarantees and scalability. Nevertheless,when addressing WSN applications with (soft/hard) timing requirements some inherent paradoxesemerge, such as power-efficiency versus timeliness, triggering the need of engineering solutions for anefficient deployment of IEEE 802.15.4 in WSNs. In this technical report, we will explore the mostrelevant characteristics of the IEEE 802.15.4 protocol for wireless sensor networks and present themost important challenges regarding time-sensitive WSN applications. We also provide some timingperformance and analysis of the IEEE 802.15.4 that unveil some directions for resolving thepreviously mentioned paradoxes.