Stochastic delay guarantees in ZigBee cluster-tree networks

ZigBee, a unique communication standard designed for low-rate personal area networks, has extremely low complexity, cost, and power consumption for wireless connectivity in inexpensive, portable, and mobile devices. Among the well-known ZigBee topologies, the cluster tree is especially suitable for wireless sensor networks because of its support for power saving operations and light-weight routing. However, the restricted routing paths caused by the cluster tree would form transmission bottlenecks such that it is difficult to guarantee quality of service (QoS) for critical packet deliveries in mission-critical networks. To address the problem, we propose a QoS-oriented framework with an analytical model to provide stochastic QoS guarantees for urgent information deliveries in ZigBee cluster-tree networks. Through analysis and simulations, we demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed framework.