4th International ICST Conference on Mobile and Ubiquitous Systems: Computing, Networking and Services

Research Article

Temporary Interconnection of ZigBee Personal Area Network (PAN)

  • @INPROCEEDINGS{10.1109/MOBIQ.2007.4451010,
        author={Sewook Jung and Alexander Chang and Mario Gerla},
        title={Temporary Interconnection of ZigBee Personal Area Network (PAN)},
        proceedings={4th International ICST Conference on Mobile and Ubiquitous Systems: Computing, Networking and Services},
        publisher={IEEE},
        proceedings_a={MOBIQUITOUS},
        year={2008},
        month={2},
        keywords={Ad hoc networks  Bridges  Energy consumption  Humans  Peer to peer computing  Performance evaluation  Personal area networks  Sensor phenomena and characterization  Wireless sensor networks  ZigBee},
        doi={10.1109/MOBIQ.2007.4451010}
    }
    
  • Sewook Jung
    Alexander Chang
    Mario Gerla
    Year: 2008
    Temporary Interconnection of ZigBee Personal Area Network (PAN)
    MOBIQUITOUS
    IEEE
    DOI: 10.1109/MOBIQ.2007.4451010
Sewook Jung1,*, Alexander Chang1,*, Mario Gerla1,*
  • 1: Department of Computer Science University of California, Los Angeles
*Contact email: sewookj@cs.ucla.edu, acmchang@cs.ucla.edu, gerla@cs.ucla.edu

Abstract

ZigBee is popular for Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) devices because of its low power consumption, built-in security method and ratified specifications. With these features, it is also suitable to be used with medical sensor devices. Medical sensors in a human body self organize a ZigBee Personal Area Network (PAN). These PANs are interconnected and form a HealthNet. For the interconnection, a ZigBee PAN detects existence of another PAN with beacon detection or active channel scan. Different ZigBee interconnection schemes are used after detection. PAN bridge method uses special bridge node that works for different PANs with time division method. PAN merge method temporarily changes PAN coordinator’s role as bridge node and merges two PANs. Peer-to-peer network temporarily share all resources when two PANs are met, but all PANs have to use the same channel and operate as an ad-hoc network. In this paper, we perform extensive evaluations using NS-2 simulations to compare PAN interconnection methods. Results show that the PAN bridge is the most useful method because it is not affected by router/node ratio and is applicable to different channel usages.