Survey of Dynamic Super-Frame Adjustment Schemes in Beacon-Enabled IEEE 802.15.4 Networks: An Application’s Perspective

IEEE 802.15.4 targets low data rate communication with limited power devices and cheap wireless networking solutions. In recent years both industry and academia are attracted to IEEE 802.15.4 because of its applicability in wireless sensor networks and wireless body area networks. An important feature of IEEE 802.15.4 is its very low duty cycle operation for conserving energy consumption of sensor device. Super-frame structure of IEEE 802.15.4 defines the duty cycle of nodes. The super-frame structure is based on two parameters: beacon order (BO) and super-frame order (SO). The performance of an IEEE 802.15.4 network depends on the values of BO and SO. These values depict the energy consumption, throughput, node discovery and latency of communication. IEEE 802.15.4 uses fixed BO and SO values which can be carefully chosen to meet the network requirements. In this paper, an extensive survey of dynamic super-frame adjustment algorithms is presented. The survey focuses on beacon-enabled star topology of IEEE 802.15.4 and studies the impact of aforementioned algorithms for various applications. Also, the survey categorizes common IEEE 802.15.4 applications based on their requirements for super-frame adjustment. A brief simulation analysis is included in this survey to highlight the impact of BO and SO on the network performance.