The Synchronized Peer‐to‐Peer Framework and Distributed Contention‐Free Medium Access for Multihop Wireless Sensor Networks

IEEE 802.15.4 is a low-power, low-rate MAC/PHY standard that meets most of the stringent requirements of singlehop wireless sensor networks. Sensor networks with nodal populations composed of thousands of devices have been envisioned in conjunction with environmental, vehicular, military applications, and many others. However, such large sensor network deployments necessitate multihop support as well as low power consumption. In the light of the standard's extremely limited joint support of the two aforementioned attributes, this paper presents two essential contributions. First, a framework is proposed to implement a new IEEE 802.15.4 operating mode, namely, the synchronized peer-to-peer mode. This mode is designed to enable the standard's low-power features in peer-to-peer multihop-ready topologies. The second contribution is a distributed GTS (dGTS) management scheme designed to function in the newly devised network mode. This protocol provides reliable contention-free access in peer-to-peer topologies in a completely distributed manner. Assuming optimal routing, our simulation experiments reveal perfect delivery ratios as long as the traffic load does not reach or surpass its saturation threshold. dGTS sustains at least twice the delivery ratio of contention-based access under suboptimal dynamic routing. Moreover, the dGTS scheme exhibits minimum power consumption by eliminating the retransmissions attributed to contention, which, in turn, reduces the number of transmissions to a minimum.