Data transmission reliability of IEEE 802.15.4 based wireless sensor networks with synchronised periodic data

The IEEE 802.15.4 medium access control (MAC) protocol, widely used in current wireless sensor networks (WSNs), shows poor data transmission reliability in delay sensitive synchronised periodic monitoring applications due to synchronicity in data transmission procedures and short backoff window length of the protocol. In this paper, we propose a new transmission strategy that has an additional random delay to overcome the above synchronicity problem and to increase the waiting time prior to data transmission. The improvements achieved in the data transmission reliability with the new strategy are verified using ns-2 simulations.