Flow control technique for LR-WPAN network in sensors data transmission

Abstract

Low-Rate Wireless Personal Area Network, LR-WPAN built on IEEE 802.15.4 is costless and very simple to use thus making it the most popular choice in sensor data handling and process. The disadvantage of LR-WPAN is the performance of the communication is not stable, hence the biggest challenge is to deal with high packet loss. Such packet loss is mainly due to data overflow at 1 or more nodes as a result of cycle time of every node is divergent therefore data is fed into longer cycle time node faster than it can process. This has resulted in receiver's buffer overwhelmed. This paper proposes a technique to control the flow of data by adding a call signal in receiver and an identifier in front of every data transmit. Minimum overhead is achieved with this technique without needing the extra channel for handshaking. The result shows a positive improvement in reducing packet loss while keeping overhead to the minimum.