Reliable beacon transmission based MAC protocol for LR-WPANs over WLAN interferences

The use of IEEE 802.15.4 standard based application systems has been rapidly increasing, for example, in medical services, sensor networks, public safety systems, and home automation systems. However, issues arise from the fact that IEEE 802.15.4 standard based low rate wireless personal area networks (LR-WPANs) use the same frequency bands as wireless local area networks (WLANs), and they interfere with each other. Based on past research on this issue, the interference has a more serious impact on LR-WPANs’ performance than on WLANs’ performance. In this paper we propose a method to improve LR-WPANs’ performance while coexisting with WLANs, which is called the reliable beacon transmission based medium access control (MAC) protocol. Since the reliability of a beacon frame is important, in this method, only the beacon frame is transmitted in interference-free channels, and the data packets are transmitted in interfered channels instead of abandoning the channels altogether. This method increases the reliability of beacon frames as well as overall channel utilizations. The effectiveness of the proposed method was evaluated through extensive simulations, and this paper proves that this method improves the performance of IEEE 802.15.4 based wireless sensor networks (WSNs) over WLANs’ interferences.