A multichannel approach to avoid beacon collisions in IEEE 802.15.4 cluster-tree industrial networks

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Abstract
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.