Multi-Channel Scheduling Protocol for Wireless Personal Area Networks

IEEE802.15.4 is a standard which specifies the physical and medium access control for low-rate, low-cost, lowpower Wireless Personal Area Networks (LR-WPANs). However, this protocol suffers from several types of collisions; In spite of being able to avoid data packets colliding with each other by using CSMA/CA, the risk of beacon collisions still remains specially in a cluster-tree network topology that exist more then one coordinator. In order to solve this problem, we propose a novel fixed channel management scheme using MCSP (Multi-Canal Scheduling Protocol). The key objective in this work is to minimize energy consumption within the network by reducing the effects of collisions that may occur if the clusters operate on the same frequency. By using a newly proposed method, MCSP use two beacon avoidance mechanisms: it starts by the fact of dividing of the hole network into a number of sub networks according to the number of the channels exists in order to avoid the inter sub networks beacon frame collisions inside, and in other side, it use the mechanism of beacon frame scheduling for each sub network in order to avoid the intra sub networks beacon frame collisions. We also evaluate the performance of the proposed scheme through simulation. The simulation results demonstrate that the proposed scheme can minimize the possibility of beacon collisions by efficiently managing the multiple available channels. while the dissipated power consumption of PAN coordinator that uses MCSP is more than the PAN that use the classical IEEE 802.15.4.