Analysis and experiments for dual-rate beacon scheduling in ZigBee/IEEE 802.15.4

Cyber-Physical Networked Systems (CPNS) are systems that integrate a multitude of nodes that perform computations for the sake of interacting with, or controlling, a physical process. The network plays an important role in CPNS supporting the interactions among the distributed nodes that enable the collaborative work towards the application goals. Some systems, e.g., target tracking systems, require reconciling properties that are strongly influenced by the network in opposing directions. For example, it is important to maintain low energy consumption to prolong lifetime but it is also important to be reactive to event propagation for quick target detection. In the ZigBee/IEEE802.15.4 standards, the beacon-enabled mode can achieve low energy consumption by adopting low duty cycles but this causes reaction latency to events to degrade. In this paper, we carry out several experiments that validate the potential of the recently proposed dual-rate beacon scheduling method for ZigBee/IEEE802.15.4 sensor networks to accomplish a trade-off between low energy consumption and rapid events propagation. The experiments include both simulation with OPNET as well as a real test-bed built on CC2430-based nodes. The results show the impact of relevant configuration parameters and the superiority of the dual-rate beacon scheduling in providing low energy consumption and low latency in CPNS.