A New Association Scheme of IEEE 802.15.4 for Real-Time Applications

IEEE 802.15.4 was developed to meet the needs for simple, low-power and low-cost wireless communication. In the past couple of years it has become a popular technology for wireless sensor network. But in practical projects, we find that a long association delay is a critical problem in some real-time applications. This paper proposes a new association scheme named fast association mechanism (FAM). By NS2 simulation results, FAM scheme shortens the association delay by 90% and 80% compared with the standard scheme respectively in two steps of association process. The effect of improvement is very obvious, and makes the wireless sensor network be applied to real-time applications.