A Beacon Scheduling for Mesh Topology in Wireless Sensor Networks

The wireless sensor network technology becomes one of core technologies to make it possible to implement various e-business applications. Energy efficiency is an important issue in wireless sensor networks. IEEE 802.15.4, a representative international standard for wireless sensor networks, provides the beacon enabled mode for energy-efficient communication. However, the beacons may conflict each other when the network is of multi-hop topology such as mesh or cluster-tree topology with beacon-enabled mode. The beacon conflict causes the failure of synchronization between sensor nodes, and affects other nodes in the network in that unsynchronized nodes cannot participate in communication. In this paper, we suggest an energy-efficient beacon scheduling for the wireless sensor networks. Nodes can save their energy duringperiod and prevent beacon conflict using beacon scheduling. We implement the scheduling using QualNet, and evaluate the performance under mesh topology networks. It turns out that the proposed scheduling may improve the energy efficiency in the networks.