On MAC Layer protocols towards internet of things:

From IEEE802.15.4 to IEEE802.15.4e

Sahar Ben Yaala

Ridha Bouallegue

InnovCOM Laboratory, SupCom

University of Carthage, Tunisia
email: sahar_by_ing@live.fr

InnovCOM Laboratory, SupCom

University of Carthage, Tunisia
email: ridha.bouallegue@supcom.tn

AbstractSensor devices are now used at any time and every

where offering ubiquitous services and leading to a new intelligent
environment. This huge number of connected devices constructs
a new paradigm called the internet of things (IoT). With the
appearance of this new concept, requirements to define robust
and scalable protocol stack are growing. Because all these devices
should communicate and share the same resources, many research
studies focused especially on the definition of a new medium
access control layer. This paper studies the evolution of medium
access protocols used in wireless sensor networks. Then it focusses
especially on the evolution from IEEE802.15.4 to IEEE802.15.4e.
An experimental evaluation of This MAC protocol is given using
FiT-IoT LAB testbed and the OpenWSN implementation. This
evaluation is based on a simple scheduling function in order to
allocate resources.
Index TermsIEEE802.15.4 ; IEEE802.15.4e ; IoT ; MAC ;
experiments

I. I NTRODUCTION
Networks may contain a big number of low-power devices
[1] connected to the internet. Sensor devices are required for
Smart Cities, Smart Buildings [2] and industrial applications
[3] to transmit measured data to a central entity. These communicating devices are constrained in energy and battery lifetime
making energy-efficiency the principal challenge to face.
Considering the tradeoff between efficiency and power consumption, a considerable attention was accorded by researchers
to design an efficient medium access control layer. The principal
motivation was to build a robust and scalable network with
longer lifetime in order to meet the key requirement of the
internet of things paradigm [4] .
In this vision, many MAC protocols have been investigated
in various domains like health care, agriculture and industry
etc. Advances and progresses become more important over the
years 2012-2016 with the formation of the 6TISCH group part
of the IETF to define a new protocol stack for the internet of
things. This group aims specially to integrate the amendment
of IEEE802.15.4 with IPV6 services.
Thus, we study in this paper the evolution of past proposed
protocols. The contribution of our work is twofold:
1) we provide an analysis of the evolution of MAC protocols
used in the domain of wireless sensor networks. This
analysis allows to understand how to select the best
protocol to use in the internet of things protocol stack.
2) we experimentally evaluate the performance of the protocol IEEE802.15.4 when using a central entity to manage
the network.
II. R ELATED W ORK
Medium access protocols for wireless sensor networks have
been investigated in the past. Many works were interested

to the evolution and the classification of MAC protocols.

Langendoen classified MAC protocols to three categories [5],
random protocols where nodes try to access randomly to get
resources, this category includes R-MAC and X-MAC. Second
class is slotted protocols,nodes should be synchronized (eg. SMAC, T-MAC). Concept of frames and slots was proposed in
the slotted category like L-MAC. The third category is the
hybrid class which combines the advantages of the different
protocols(e.g.SCPMAC). A survey conducted by Huanget al.
summarizes MAC protocols into frame-slotted, asynchronous,
synchronous, and multichannel protocols [6].
Other works have been interested to IEEE802.15.4 for MAC
Layer design [7].The research community consider it as the
typical standard to define physical and MAC layer. Thats why
it was considered the principal standard to define the zigbee
technology.
Zigbee combines IEEE802.15.4 for low layers with others
protocols for application and security services. Zigbee was used
in many WSN domains. Recently Kasapovic et al. proposed a
new approch to adapt it for Home Environment [8].
Two other schemes were considered as efficient for industrial
applications, ISA 110.11a [9] and WirelessHART [10]. WirelessHART is based on time division multiple access (TDMA)
to manage scheduling functions, offering reduced delay and
energy consumption and benefits from IEEE802.15.4 for physical access. ISA is robust in the presence of different sources of
interference such as bluetooth, wifi, LoRA or other technologies
sharing the ISM band.

Fig. 1: Superframe Structure in IEEE 802.15.4

A. IEEE802.15.4
IEEE802.15.4 was first proposed for low-rate personal area
networks [11]. In this standard, transmissions follow a superframe structure and nodes use CSMA/CA as channel access
mechanism. Two different access modes have been proposed
by IEEE802.15.4 depending on the use of slotted CSMA/CA
or unslotted CSMA/CA.
If nodes use slotted CSMA/CA, we are speaking about the
beacon enabled mode. Boundaries of the superframe are defined
using beacons sent from a personal area coordinator in order

Fig. 2: Slotframe Structure in IEEE 802.15.4e

to ask nodes to join the network. The duration between two

beacons is called beacon interval (BI). As illustrated in Fig. 1
the superframe duration is devided into two period: an active
and an inactive period where the coordinator switch to sleeping
mode.
Active period is the combination of the contention acces
period (CAP) and the contention free period (CFP). During
CAP nodes try to join network using the slotted CSMA. CFP
is the sum of 16 time slots to offer access for nodes with high
needs of quality of services.
Many research studies relied of IEEE802.15.4 to configure
MAC layer. A survey was proposed by Khanafer et al.,it classified Beacon IEEE802.15.4 approaches into eight categories that
depend on use of priority, QoS services, Backoff parameters,
etc [12].
B. Limitations of IEEE802.15.4
Previous studies identified some limitations of this standard:
1) Performance under dense deployments scenarios: The
performance of this MAC standard decreases in the case
of a dense deployment scenario due to the use of CSMACA as access mechanism.
2) Co-existence problems: If we consider many networks
that share the same frequency band. Problems of interference could be identified. In fact, sharing the same frequency resources may create many collisions and fading
multipath problems.
To be part of an internet of things stack, this MAC standard
should introduce some enhancements to overcome its limitations. An amendment of IEEE802.15.4 has been proposed to
resolve these problems.
C. IEEE802.15.4e
To address problems of interference and fading multipath
a new amendment of IEEE802.15.4 was proposed in 2012.
Depending on the domain of application and the needs the new
standard proposes three access mode:
1) Deterministic and Synchronous Multi-channel Extension
(DSME)
2) Low Latency Deterministic Network (LLDN)
3) Timeslotted Channel Hopping (TSCH)
DSME defines an extended version of the superframe structure
used in the beacon enabled mode of IEEE802.15.4 (CAP, CFP
and GTS) and increases the number of frequency channels.
LLDN mode is designed for star topologies and without channel

hopping mechanism. In our work, we are mainly interested

on the TSCH mode. In this mode Time synchronisation and
frequency hopping are used in order to reduce interference. To
join the network, the same concept of the beacon enabled mode
is used. Nodes aiming to join the network listen for beacons.
Once they receive a beacon they share the same slotframe
structure as the whole network.
The Path Computation Element manages the network (PCE).
Fig. 2 illustrates the structure of the frame which repeats
periodically as defined by the standard. Two categories of cells
are used. Shared cells are used to send beacons and to execute
CSMA mechanism and dedicated cells are used to send data.
A cell is a slot offset combined with a channel offset. If a
cell A is dedicated to send data from A to R, the same cell will
be used by R to receive data from A. 16 channel offests are
used offering channel hopping functionalities.
To avoid collisions, the absolute sequence number ASN is
used to compute time. This time indicator is sent by the router
(PCE) and shared among all devices.
Channel of frequency to use is de-terminated using the
translation function below:
f req = (ASN + channel of f set) mod 16

(1)

The channel offset to use is given by channel of f set. The

duration of the slot is defined by the standard to be enough to
send a packet and receive its acknowledgement. It is equal to
15 ms.
Because cristal oscillators are used, clock drifts are present,
the standard proposes two mechanisms of synchronisation to
avoid clock drifts.
1) Frame-based Synchronization :
It is the receiver who must adjust its clock based on the
data received from the PCE.
2) ACK-based Synchronization:
The PCE have to compute the correction period and to
send it to connected nodes using acknowledgments.
This protocol was integrated in the 6TISCH protocol stack
which meets internet of things requirements. This IPv6 Stack
uses IEEE802.15.4 and IEEE802.15.4e for physical and access control. For routing function RPL is considered. Application layer relies on Constrained Application Protocol
(CoAP)offering a low overhead.
The standard defines On the Fly Scheduling (OTF) for
bandwidth management and cells reservation without imposing
a scheduling algorithm.

We focus here on the performance of this protocol part of the

6TISCH Stack using a simple scheduling function. Evaluation
is based on experiments conducted using the Fit Iot LAB
platform [13] and the only implementation of the 6TISCH
stack OpenWSN [14] .
III. E XPERIMENTAL C ONFIGURATION
A. Experimental Setup

1) Scheduling: Centralized Schedule

We consider the standard version of TSCH which proposes to
implement a channel hopping mechanism. IEEE802.15.4e does
not impose the use of a specific strategy to manage the schedule
and reserve ressources. However, it defines how a dedicated cell
could be added or deleted.
Lets consider here a simple mechanism to assign cells.
Nodes negotiate a set of available resources with the router.
Then, they are assigned cells in a consecutive order as depicted
in figure. 4.

Experiments were conducted on the Strasbourg FiT-IOT LAB

Testbed (figure. 3). The testbed contains 256 nodes which are
deployed in a 150 m2 space. We specially used M3 Nodes
based on IEEE802.15.4 radio chipsets and ARM Cortex M3
micro-controller.
In order to evaluate the performance of IEEE802.15.4, we
used the OpenWSN project.

Fig. 4: Scheduling mechanism

We implemented this mechanism as depicted in algo. 1.

Algorithm 1: Schedule Configuration
Fig. 3: Strasbourg Testbed Topology-M3 motes
1
2

OpenWSN is an open source solution implemented in C

which runs IEEE802.15.4-TSCH in the MAC layer. Informations such as time of transmission and reception, addresses
and ASN are collected from sensors using serial interfaces and
stored in log files.

3
4
5
6
7
8

B. Metrics

We evaluate the performance of IEEE 802.15.4e-TSCH networks based on three metrics:

1) Delay: The delay is computed according to the elapsed
time between the packet generation from a given node and its
reception by the router.
It is calculated as follows:
Delay = (ASNRX ASNT X ) 15ms

(2)

where the absolute sequence number ASNRX and ASNT X are

used to timestamp the packet generation and reception time.
2) PDR(Packet Delivery Ratio): It computes the ratio of
packets correctly delivered to the border router
3) Losses distribution: We study the amount of delivered
and lost packets over time.
C. Configuration parameters
In this part, we propose a configuration which permits to
evaluate the performance of IEEE802.15.4e-TSCH. Our implementation is based on RPL protocol and TSCH.
Specifically, the following functions are investigated:

// The algorithm needs the available slot-offsets

and channel-offsets
Data: available slot-offsets and channel-offsets
Result: T Sof f set , CHof f set
if All-cells-are-allocated() then
T Sof f set ;
CHof f set ;
end
// Select the next free cell for transmission
do
// select the next free time slot
T Sof f set nextT Sof f set %(0..SlotF rameLengh 1);
// select an available channel offset
CHof f set available(0..15);
until we-can-reserve-a-new-cell;
return (T Sof f set , CHof f set );

The main object of this function is to schedule the next free

cell for the next transmission.
Using this scheduling function, the first available free cell
(a slot offset and a channel offset) could be used to transmit
COAP packets between a given node and its border router.
2) Routing: RPL
We used IPv6 Routing Protocol(RPL) for Low-Power and
Lossy Networks to manage routing functions. Three types of
traffic are supported by RPL: point-to-point, point-to-multipoint
and multipoint-to-point traffic. Nodes are organized as a Destination Oriented DAGs (DODAGs) and connected to the border
router. They form a simple RPL topology.To find the next hop,
each node negotiates a set of cells with its parent. RPL assigns
each node a rank, which measures the location in the DODAG.
To configure RPL, two parameters are used: DODAG Information Object (DIO) and Destination Advertisement Object
(DAO).
3) Traffic: COAP trafic
To evaluate the performance of IEEE802.15.4e, we generated
a constant bit rate of COAP traffic. We transmit frames with
127 bytes. We used two bytes to transmit CRC, 1-byte to send

the Frame Control Sequence and we reserved an other field

containing 1-byte to identify the packet.
We set the transmission power to 0 dBm for all packets.
Different configuration parameters are illustrated in table. I.
Slotframe length
Shared cells
Timeslot duration
Traffic type
Inter packet time
Bandwidth Assignment

101
5
15ms
CBR
variable
Adaptive

TABLE I: Default parameter values

The slotframe duration is equal to 1515 ms, more precisely
it contains 101 time slots. Each slot is used to send a packet
and its acknowledgement.
Shared cells are located in the beginning of the slotframe
with a consecutive order.
IV. R ESULTS AND DISCUSSIONS

Fig. 6: Comparison of PDR between IEEE802.15.4 and

IEEE802.15.4eImpact of the distance from the border router

A. Comparison with IEEE802.15.4

In order to validate the evolution from IEEE802.15.4 to
IEEE802.15.4e and to compare between these two MAC protocols as discussed in the first part of this work, we referred to
different configuration to conduct experiments .
Two scenarios were considered. In the first scenario, we
measured the PDR when having a number of nodes varying
from 5 to 35. The topology is created by connecting nodes to
the same border router. All nodes generate the same amount of
data as explained in the previous part.

According to Fig. 6, we can verify that the number of

delivered packets is increased when we configure our network
with IEEE802.15.4e.
For successfully validating this MAC protocol, we conduct
more experiments.
B. Evaluation of IEEE802.15.4e
In this part, we performed several experiments varying the
inter packet time. figures are represented with 95 % confidence
intervals.
Experiments are set such that ten devices are connected to the
border router sending COAP traffic as described in the previous
section. Then we investigated the PDR, the delay and packet
lossess.
1) PDR: In Fig. 7, we evaluated the amount of packets
received by the border router. We fixed the number of connected
devices and kept the same distance to the router.
We forced the schedule to execute the previous algorithm for
cells scheduling. Then, we varied the time that separates two
transmissions from 1000 ms to 10000 ms.

Fig. 5: Comparison of PDR between IEEE802.15.4 and

IEEE802.15.4eImpact of number of nodes
Fig. 5 visualizes the packet delivery ratio for the different
implementations. We can verify that for the two scenarios: the
higher density of network is, the lower the PDR is.
However, analyzing the values of PDR which are higher then
95 % for IEEE802.15.4e, we can conclude that this protocol is
a natural evolution of MAC layers that permits to meet internet
of things requirements.
In the second scenario, We increased the distance from the
border router to quantify its impact. We selected a topology of
ten nodes.

Fig. 7: PDR evaluation

It can be noticed that the PDR is increasing as much as the

inter packet time is getting higher. To improve the performance
of the network, we have to increase time between sent packets.
To more understand the behavior of the IEEE802.15.4e
network we continue to perform experiments. We will focus
especially on the long term reliability. Thus, we will plot the
loss distribution and analyse how losses are distributed.
In the last part of this work, we will study the performance
of this network in term of end to end delays.
2) Losses evaluation: We investigate in Fig. 8 the performance of the network over time. The ASN indicates the
evolution of time. Then we report the number of packets lost
and received from the border router. We used 6000 ms as inter
packet time.
10

lost
received

Number of packets

forward. To improve the reliability of this standard in the case

of big traffic to manage, new scheduling mechanisms need to
be proposed and evaluated.
V. C ONCLUSION
In this research study, we investigated the evolution of the
different MAC protocols used in the field of wireless sensor
networks. Also, we focussed on IEEE802.15.4 as it is considered as the de-facto standard offering reliability and a reduced
energy consumption.
Then, we evaluated the performance of the amendment
of IEEE802.15.4 when a central entity is used to manage
resources allocation. As no scheduling mechanism is defined
by the standard, we implemented a simple function to schedule
ressources. Using this strategy, performance improvements are
observed especially in the case of limited trafic.
In future work, we aim to propose new centralized and distributed mechanisms to schedule resources and avoid collisions.
R EFERENCES

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Fig. 8: Loss distribution evaluation

We can observe that the collisions occur in specified intervals
of times, after these intervals the network try to reserve new
cells to avoid collisions and improve network performance.
3) Delay: We measured delay while gradually increasing the
inter packet time. Ten values of inter packet time are considered.
Fig. 9 outlines delay measurements.

Fig. 9: Delay evaluation

We can remark that for the different configurations, delay is
reduced.
In conclusion, IEEE802.15.4e is considered reliable and
robust especially when we have a low quantity of data to

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