Impact of Beacon Order and Superframe Order on IEEE 802.15.4 for Nodes Association in WBAN

Abstract

IEEE 802.15.4, Low data Rate low power Wireless Personal Area Network (LR-WPAN) standard uses fixed duty cycle of the superframe operation. Fixed duty cycle operation of the stated standard suffers from several network issues like Personal Area Network (PAN) tedious initialization interval, nodes association duration, number of associated nodes, average network delay, throughput and nodes energy etc. Low duty cycle control operation with lower energy consumption of the network is one of the attractive feature of IEEE 802.15.4. Two superframe parameters Beacon Order (BO) and Superframe Order (SO) decide the beacon interval and duty cycle of the standard and has a strong impact on the performance of other network parameters. In this paper we analyze the IEEE 802.15.4 MAC with brief simulations by varying the two superframe parameters BO and SO to accomplish the finest performance of the WBAN network.

Keywords

• IEEE 802.15.4
• Wireless Body Area Network
• Superframe
• Nodes Association