Extending the Battery Life of the ZigBee Routers and Coordinator by Modifying Their Mode of Operation

Abstract

Wireless sensor networks proliferate more and more in all social scopes and sectors. Such networks are implemented in smart homes, smart cities, security systems, medical resources, agriculture, automotive industry, etc. Communication devices and sensors of such networks are powered with batteries: the enlarging of battery life is a hot research topic. We focus on wireless sensor networks based on ZigBee technology. While sleep standard operation mode is defined for end devices, it is not the case for the rest of devices (routers and Coordinator), which usually always remain in active mode. We designed a formal optimization model for maximizing the enlarging of the battery life of routers and Coordinator, allowing us to delimit practical successful conditions. It was successfully tested with a standard ZigBee datasheet comprising technical data for sensors, routers, and coordinators. It was tested in a practical wireless sensor network assembly with XBee S2C devices. We derived, from the previous model, a novel but simple protocol of communication among routers and coordinators. It was tested in different use cases. We showed that when end devices generate traffic at regular intervals, the enlarging of the battery life of routers and Coordinator was possible only under certain use cases.Sensors 2020, 20, 30 2 of 22 named end devices (EDs), with different sleep modes. The EDs are programmed to realize a prefixed sampling period, from a few seconds to days or more, and they remain idle until the next sampling period. Conversely, all other devices, like Router Devices (RD) and the Coordinator (C), remain active always. That is, they never are in sleep mode.In our previous work [11][12][13], we proposed a sleep mode of operation for WiFi Access Points (AP) for regular emitted traffic from WiFi terminals obtaining a considerable amount of energy-saving. Despite WSN and WiFi networks having different characteristics, operations, and functions, in this paper, we apply those previous ideas to include the sleep mode of operation in RDs and C when EDs emit traffic periodically. At the beginning of each period of time, the RDs and C enter active mode and find out the WSN spanning tree using any routing algorithm. The leaf nodes of that tree are the EDs, the intermediary nodes are the RDs, and the root is the C. Each RD manages one branch of the tree and can estimate when it will receive data frames from its children nodes (EDs or others RDs in the tree). After that, the RDs will send data frames to the upper-level RD or to the C (at level 0 of the tree). Once received and after sending the data frames, the RDs or the C can pass to sleep mode until the next beginning of the period of time. The enlarging of their battery life corresponds to the amount of time the RDs and C will be in sleep mode. The main objective of this paper is to show, under previous assumptions, if it is possible to obtain a significate enlarging of the battery of ZigBee RDs and C considering commercial devices. Up to our knowledge, we are the first to c...

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