Improving military operations using low rate wireless personal area networks

Low rate wireless personal area networks (LR-WPANs) target low data rate, low power consumption and low cost wireless networking, and offer device level wireless connectivity. They are ideal for applications such as public security, battle field monitoring, inventory tracking, as well as home and office automation. IEEE 802.15.4 is the first standard designed for LR-WPANs, We develop an NS2 simulator based on IEEE 802.15.4 and conduct several sets of experiments to study various features of LR-WPANs, including: (1) star topology and peer-to-peer topology; (2) beacon enabled mode and non-beacon enabled mode; (3) association, tree formation and network auto-configuration; (4) orphaning and coordinator relocation; and (5) direct, indirect and guaranteed time slot (GTS) data transmissions.