Performance improvement of IEEE 802.15.4 beacon-enabled WPAN with superframe adaptation via traffic indication

The IEEE 802.15.4 standard provides the widely accepted solution for low-cost and low-power wireless communications. Despite its design support for low duty-cycle operation, the fixed superframe size in Beacon-enabled mode limits its capabilities due to two contrasting goals; energy efficiency and higher data throughput. In this paper, we propose an enhancement of IEEE 802.15.4 Beacon-enabled mode which adaptively adjusts the active period based on the traffic information. In order to detect the data traffic in the networks, the proposed scheme utilizes the IEEE 802.15.4 CCA function. Evaluation results show that our scheme can improve energy efficiency as well as data throughput.