Enhanced Beaconless Synchronization for Regulatory Domain Specific IEEE 802.15.4g Smart Utility Networks

This paper proposes a generic enhanced beaconless synchronization mechanism for industrial standard IEEE 802.15.4g Smart Utility Networks (SUN) in multiple regulatory domains globally. IEEE 802.15.4g has specified different regulatory domains for SUN applications, each with a distinctive set of channelization and corresponding operating parameters such as center frequency, channel width and channel spacing. This has added new challenges not limited to, but particularly in beaconless synchronization mechanism supporting low energy consumption demands in conventional IEEE 802.15.4 low rate wireless personal area networks (WPANs). This paper first provides the updates in the SUN technical specification, identifies the challenges due to the effort of addressing multi-regional governing regulatory demands and then proposes a generic solution to tackle the problem. This simple but straightforward approach is preferable in industrial applications with strict energy efficiency requirement. The proposed beaconless synchronization mechanism has outlined two metrics with conflicting interest, namely required time to achieve synchronization and effective bandwidth for data communication. As a result, it is found that as the input radio resource increases, the effective communication bandwidth increases exponentially, while the required time for synchronization increases only linearly.