Self-configuration of IEEE 802.15.4 wireless PANs for urban applications

Pervasive sensor devices are expected to flood the urban environments of the future to provide citizens with specific services. Such services will be based on the monitoring of a multiplicity of urban parameters such as the level of the acoustic/environmental pollution, the presence of traffic jams, specific cultural events, etc. Citizens themselves, through their portable digital devices equipped with sensors, can collect images, sounds and environmental parameters and provide a “real time” vision of a portion of a city or of a particular event. The use of IEEE 802.15.4 wireless sensor networks for this data collection seems particularly appropriate thanks to the characteristics of self-configurability, adaptability, scalability and low cost of this wireless Standard. In this work, we present a distributed procedure able to self-configure an IEEE 802.15.4 Wireless Personal Area Network (WPAN) in order to control the resulting network depth by selecting a suitable node that will perform the coordination of the WPAN. Performance evaluation shows that this approach for reconfiguring the WPAN achieves the goal of limiting the network depth. This will result in a reduction of the overall WPAN energy consumption and packets delay that are key performance parameters to be optimized for urban applications.