Preemptive re-association scheme for beacon-enabled wireless personal area networks

Abstract

Communication in wireless personal area networks (WPANs) is characterized as short range (up to few meters). In beacon-enabled cluster-tree-based WPANs, node mobility can result in several cell changes. Each cell change is detected after the connectivity with previous cell is broken. Moreover, end devices are unable to transmit or receive application data while performing time-consuming scanning and re-association procedures. In this scenario, frequent node mobility can degrade the performance of WPAN. In existing literature, research efforts are made to improve connectivity and re-association procedure individually, but due to their contradictory assumptions, they cannot be used together. In this work, we modify the re-association procedure of IEEE 802.15.4 to decrease both re-association frequency and latency for a beacon-enabled cluster-tree-based WPAN with mobile end devices and coordinators.