A novel technique for ZigBee coordinator failure recovery and its impact on timing synchronization

In mission critical wireless sensor networks (WSNs) accurate timestamping of the occurrence of events measured by the sensor nodes is often required together with a high degree of reliability. While precise timestamping requires synchronization of the sensor nodes, reliability is obtained by adding redundancy in all potential single point of failure nodes. In this paper, we focus on a ZigBee-based WSN using two personal area network (PAN) coordinators with different PAN identifiers (IDs) and, for this configuration, we propose a solution where if the primary PAN coordinator goes down, connections are transferred to the other by changing the PAN ID of the nodes. Our proposed solution provides significant gains in terms of recovery speed and timing synchronization accuracy in comparison to a solution that is proposed in the literature.