A Multichannel Approach to Avoid Beacon Collisions in IEEE 802.15.4 Cluster-Tree Industrial Networks

The IEEE 802.15.4 standard leaves the problem of beacon collisions in cluster-tree topologies unsolved. Some recent work tries to solve this problem, either drastically reducing scalability or introducing some non-determinism that make them unsuitable for industrial communications. In this paper we propose a novel multi-channel approach to the beacon collision avoidance problem. Thanks to the use of multiple radio channels in the same network, it enhances scalability of cluster-tree IEEE 802.15.4 networks while allowing contention-free scheduling. A multichannel super-frame scheduling (MSS) algorithm is presented that, following the multichannel approach, can outperform single-channel algorithms under given analytical conditions.