Review of Beacon Collision Avoidance Methods in IEEE 802.15.4 Standard

The IEEE 802.15.4 standard along with ZIGBEE specifications is used as communication standard for minimum power consumption, inexpensive networks such as LR-WPAN. The networks have different topologies depending on its applications such as Peer-to-Peer, Cluster tree, Mesh and STAR topology. In IEEE 802.15.4 standard for MAC layer , there are two modes of operations which are non-beacon mode and beacon mode. In beacon mode, PAN coordinators will send beacon signals to synchronize with their respective nodes, manage the network and the power of the transmitting systems and also perform the time synchronization of the data. Thus, if there are more than one PAN coordinators in the vicinity of each other, there is a probability of the collision of beacon signals from different PAN coordinators which may lead to loss of data. In order to handle this problem, various algorithms through different approaches are being developed but still the problem persists. In this paper, we provide the overview of various beacon collision avoidance algorithms which can reduce the beacon frame collisions and also supports Quality of Service issues.