Design of an IEEE 802.15.4 compliant slave/slave bridge to support inter-WPAN communication using CSMA-CA

IEEE 802.15.4 is an emerging wireless standard for short range Wireless Personal Area Networks (WPANs) that provides low data rate, low cost, low power consumption and low complexity among battery-operated inexpensive devices. It is considered as an enabling technology for wireless sensor networks. The current IEEE 802.1.5.4 standard does not propose any mechanism to perform interconnection of IEEE 802.15.4 compliant beacon enabled network clusters. Therefore, I have designed and developed a bridging algorithm in an ordinary device node to enable communication between two or more IEEE 802.15.4 compliant beacon enabled network clusters. The design involves both uplink and downlink transmissions to the coordinator and the bridge respectively. I investigate the interactions among device, coordinator and bridge nodes by varying certain control parameters such as number of devices and packet arrival rate. Furthermore, the performance metrics such as channel access probability, throughput and probability of successful transmission are measured. I analyze network performance of both acknowledged and non-acknowledged packet transfer for array types of network and larger 2-dimensional networks. Moreover, I compare the performance of acknowledged and non-acknowledged packet transfer mode in relatively large networks. Results from my research can provide useful guidelines in the design of large networks regarding cluster size, packet arrival rate and bridge buffer capacity. The proposed work is achieved using simulation study.;Keywords. WPAN. LR-WPAN, CSMA-CA.