A Dynamic Zigbee Protocol for Reducing Power Consumption

One of the obstacles preventing the Zigbee protocol from being widely used is the excessive power consumption of Zigbee devices in low bandwidth and low power requirement applications. This paper proposes a protocol that resolves the power efficiency problem. The proposed protocol reduces the power consumption of Zigbee devices in beacon-enabled networks without increasing the time taken by Zigbee peripherals to communicate with their coordinator. The proposed protocol utilizes a beacon control mechanism called a "sleep pattern" which is updated based on the previous event statistics. It determines exactly when Zigbee peripherals wake up or sleep. A simulation of the proposed protocol using realistic parameters and an experiment using commercial products yielded similar results demonstrating that the protocol may be a solution to reduce the power consumption of Zigbee devices.