Proactive Neighbour Aware Fast Association Scheme over IEEE 802.15.4

Abstract

IEEE 802.15.4 is the de facto standard for wireless sensor network (WSNs) which define the physical and the MAC layers. IEEE 802.15.4 has been extensively employed in various sensor network applications and its application domain is expanding day by day. Furthermore, efficiency and improvement in mobility handling are expected to facilitate numerous more applications. The awareness and concern of healthy life and explosion of various smart wearable for continuous health monitoring have demanded a need for wireless technology with robust mobility handling and IEEE 802.15.4 is no doubt a suitable candidate. However, the poor efficacy of mobility handling in IEEE 802.15.4 is one salient reason preventing it from being a dominant choice. We observed that the amount of time required for the association process is the key reason why IEEE 802.15.4 is unable to handle the mobility. Nevertheless, there are various improvements possible in order to enhance the association process, which is the main topic of this thesis.

In this thesis, a new fast association technique is proposed that prevents nodes from scanning multiple channels. In the proposed scheme we propose to maintain a list with details of all the neighbors in the vicinity such that the mobile node has a clear picture of the surrounding. Whenever the node needs to perform a handover, it scans only those channel in the list, which drastically decrease the number of channels the node has to scan. Our scheme is simple but yet effective for the fast association of devices. Based on the theoretical and the simulation based analysis, we verify the benefits of the proposed mechanism in terms of most relevant performance metrics.

We have developed both the mathematical model and the simulation model for the analysis. The detailed performance analysis is provided to demonstrate the performance gain achieved by the proposed scheme.

The schemes that we have presented in this dissertation is simple and can be easily implemented in IEEE 802.15.4. We expect that our proposed method will be beneficial in various sensor network applications.