IEEE 802.15.4: A Wireless Communication Technology

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) have been attracting increasing interest for supporting a new generation of ubiquitous computing systems with great potential for many applications such as surveillance, environmental monitoring, health care monitoring or home automation. However, the communication paradigms in WSNs differ from the ones associated to traditional wireless networks, triggering the need for new communication protocols. In this context, the IEEE 802.15.4 protocol presents some potentially interesting features for supporting large-scale ubiquitous computing applications, namely power- efficiency, timeliness and scalability. Nevertheless, when addressing applications with (soft/hard) timing requirements some inherent paradoxes emerge, such as powerefficiency versus timeliness. Consequently, there is the need of engineering solutions for an efficient deployment of IEEE 802.15.4 in such scenarios. In this paper, we present some of the most important results on the IEEE 802.15.4 protocol that have been achieved within the context of wireless sensor networks. The paper outlines the most relevant characteristics of the IEEE 802.15.4 protocol and presents the most important research challenges regarding time-sensitive WSN-based applications. Then, it presents some timing performance analysis that unveils some directions for resolving the previously mentioned paradoxes.