A Beacon and GTS Scheduling Scheme for IEEE 802.15.4 DSME Networks

The IEEE 802.15.4 standard is one of the widely adopted networking specification for realizing different applications of Internet of Things (IoT). It defines several physical layer options and medium access control (MAC) sublayer protocols for low-power devices supporting low-data rates. One such MAC protocol is the deterministic and synchronous multichannel extension (DSME), which addresses the limitation on the maximum number of guaranteed time slots (GTSs) in 802.15.4-2011 MAC, and provides channel diversity to increase network robustness. However, beacon scheduling in peer-to-peer networks suffers from beacon slot collisions when two or more coordinators simultaneously compete for the same vacant beacon slot. In addition, the standard does not explore DSME-GTS scheduling (DGS) across multiple channels. This article addresses the beacon slot collision problem by proposing a nonconflicting beacon scheduling mechanism using association order (AO). Furthermore, a distributed multichannel DSME-GTS schedule is proposed that optimally assigns DSME-GTSs across different channels. The objective is to minimize the number of times-lots used while maximizing the usage of available channels. Through simulations, the proposed mechanisms’ performance is analyzed in terms of energy efficiency, transmission overhead, scheduling efficiency, throughput, and latency and is shown to outperform the other existing schemes.