Adaptive Duty Cycling in IEEE 802.15.4 Cluster Tree Networks Using MAC Parameters

The IEEE 802.15.4 standard does not support adaptive duty cycles. Prior works in this direction are either based on superframe occupation ratio or buffer occupancy/queue length of the transmitting nodes. In this paper, we find the respective limitations of both these schemes that lead to sub-optimal duty cycle parameter settings. Afterward, a duty cycling algorithm is proposed wherein the channel state is estimated with the help of MAC parameters (macMinBE, macMaxCSMABackoffs, and macMaxFrameRetries) that induces dynamic adaptation of duty-cycle among the nodes. A Markov model is developed for IEEE 802.15.4 carrier sense multiple access with collision avoidance (CSMA-CA) to estimate the delay and energy consumption while transmitting frames using MAC parameters.