Algorithms and Methods beyond the IEEE 802.15.4 Standard for a Wireless Home Network Design and Implementation

The aim of this paper is to describe techniques and algorithms that have been used to design and implement a commercial wireless home network (WHN). Although IEEE 802.15.4 supposes an efficient solution for the lower layers of the communication stack, several key issues are out of its scope. Topology control (TC) of the network, address management, and multi-hop synchronization are some of these issues, which are covered in this paper. The WHN has been designed taking in mind low complexity, low consumption, and low end-to-end latency. These objectives have been reached thanks to a multi-hop beaconed structure, a distributed address management, and a routing algorithm based on masks.