Performance analysis of a Zigbee beacon enabled cluster tree network

Abstract

Zigbee provides a realistic and feasible solution for the implementation of ‘low data rate’, ‘low cost’ and ‘minimum energy consumption’ networks. These attractive features are compelling the industry to adopt Zigbee and deploy and integrate it in a whole slew of consumer market applications. Energy consumption always plays a critical role in modern system design and coerces developers to propose and exploit various routing techniques to minimize power losses. The IEEE 802.15.4 standard has been made use of for the MAC and physical layers of the Zigbee protocol stack. In our work we have identified that a clustered network approach brings about minimum energy consumption in such networks; this is owes to the fact of load distribution among data aggregating heads. We provide a beacon enabled performance analysis of such network. The impact of Zigbee's deployment has been felt in e.g. the health care industry, patient monitoring, home are networks, remote surveillance and management and consumer wireless devices such as cell phones, PDA's, etc. We expect our findings to aid in developers in engineering systems in the aforementioned applications; in such a manner that Zigbee's integration would result in networks that consume minimal energy, thereby, conserving energy and ensuring maximal longevity of the network and its devices.