Reliable Broadcast Scheme for IEEE 802.15.5 Low-Rate WPAN Mesh Networks

The IEEE has recently released IEEE 802.15.5 standard [3] to provide multi-hop mesh functions for low-rate wireless personal area networks (WPANs). In this paper, we extensively describe a link-layer reliable broadcast protocol referred to as timer-based reliable broadcast (TRB) [3] in the IEEE 802.15.5 standard. The TRB scheme exploits (1) bitmap based implicit ACK to effectively reduce the unnecessary error control messages and (2) randomized timer for ACK transmission to substantially reduce the possibility of contentions. Performance evaluation shows that the TRB scheme achieves 100% reliability compared with other schemes with expense of slightly increased energy consumption. key words: personal area network, reliable broadcast, mesh network, timer, and acknowledgement