An efficient and reliable data transmission control method for relaxing congestion problem in ZigBee network

Abstract

In the current ZigBee network protocol, the data size to be transmitted at a time is limited. The data congestion problem occurred on a specific node often degrades the whole network performance. In this paper, we propose an efficient and reliable data transmission control method for a situation where the data congestion problems are expected to happen due to a large amount of data transmission. Based on the current ZigBee stack application support sub-layer (APS), we present additional mechanisms which include the ZigBee data segmentation (ZDS) function, the modified acknowledgment transmission (MAT) function, and the ZigBee congestion control (ZCC) function. Using network simulator-2 (NS2), we demonstrate the validity and the usefulness of the proposed methods. The performance of the proposed methods is also compared with that of the current ZigBee network protocol.