Zigbee-based Multi-channel Wireless Sensor Networks To Achieve

IEEE 802.15.4/Zigbee, a wireless standard which is short distance, low data rate and low power consumption, has been widely used in wireless sensor networks in the last several years. But its MAC protocol is only designed for single-channel PAN(Personal Area Network), while its PHY protocol and many Zigbee transceivers all allows for up to 16 channels in the frequency band of 2.4GHz . So in this paper, we propose a Zigbee based multi-channel WSN (wireless sensor networks) solution, in which the sensor nodes are partitioned into clusters and each cluster is assigned a channel that different from its neighbor clusters.First, in this paper, we design some mechanisms such as network topology, synchronization, channel assignment and data transmission. Then, we evaluate the performance of some of these mechanisms through simulation. The result shows that sometimes there can be unsuccessful when assigning channels, so we propose a solution to solve the problem. Besides, after comparing CSMA-CA and polling mechanism by simulation, we choose the latter as the data transmission mechanism. Finally, we implement a Zigbee hardware platform based on this strategy, which presents a real design of multi-channel WSN that discussed above. After a series of hardware and software testing, it is demonstrated that each module of the system works well as expected.