Multi-dimensional channel management scheme to avoid beacon collision in LR-WPAN

Advances in MEMS, microprocessor, and wireless technologies, have accelerated deployment of network-capable computing devices attached to various objects over the world. These devices should be small in size and have a characteristic of extremely low power consumption. Therefore, in 2004, IEEE802.15.4 has been established as a global standard satisfying low power and low cost. After that, the phenomenal popularity of this standard has also led to the indiscreet deployment of WPANs. Therefore, LR-WPANs sometimes suffer 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. In order to solve this problem, we propose a novel dynamic channel management scheme using MDS (Multi-dimensional Scheduling). By using a newly proposed scan method, MDS can find the new clean channel to change and time offset to transmit a new beacon frame. 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 in a hybrid manner combining proactive and reactive methods while the dissipated power consumption of PAN coordinator that uses MDS is more than that of PC that use IEEE 802.15.4.