WIRELESS COMMUNICATION

Basics of IEEE 802.15.4 PHY/MAC protocol

By Brian Blum Texas Instruments

The last five years have been exciting for anyone involved in the short-range, low-power RF market. For those still getting up to speed, an extensive portfolio of products focusing on shortrange wireless communication operating sub 1-GHz or global 2.4-GHz industrial, scientific, and medical bands continues to grow, with new innovations being announced readily. The most popular family of devices supports the IEEE-defined 802.15.4 standard. As shown in Figure 1, this standard defines the physical (PHY) and medium access control (MAC) layers for low data-rate, shortrange wireless communication. Although operation is defined for both sub 1GHz and 2.4GHz frequency bands, the majority of todays devices support the direct sequence spread spectrum-based 2.4-GHz solution. The 802.15.4 standard supports raw data throughput of 250 kbps and can transmit point-to-point anywhere from tens to hundreds of metres, depending on the output power and receive sensitivity of the transceiver. These chips can come as transceivers, system-on-chips, or in a network processor (NP) form factor with a pre-programmed network protocol. The 802.15.4 PHY/MAC is the underlying protocol for ZigBee, 6LoWPAN and RF4CE. Among other things, it defines basic network start-up, device discovery and joining, security, and acknowledged unicast and broadcast communication. Two device configurations, fully functional device (FFD) and reduced functional device (RFD),

are defined to support a simple star topology where a single coordinator FFD supports multiple FFDs and/or RFDs (Figure 2). The RFDs are child nodes that can optionally sleep, periodically waking up to determine from their parent FFD whether they have any pending incoming data. The FFDs are always on and can communicate peer-to-peer with other FFDs at any time. Two configurations, beaconbased and non-beacon-based, are supported in 802.15.4. Non-beacon-based requires an always-on parent with potentially sleeping children, and beacon-based supporting both a sleeping parent and sleeping children where the children synchronise to the parent device, which broadcasts a beacon at a regular, fixed interval. Translating this to your application, the 802.15.4 PHY/MAC is most beneficial under certain conditions. First, adding MAC protocol overhead brings the 250 kbps raw throughput down to around 120 kbps application throughput. Remember, this is potentially divided between several nodes, so 802.15.4 works best for lower data-rate applications (streaming audio is more than pushing these limits). Second, the 802.15.4 MAC is specifically defined for a star topology. Therefore, if you only have two nodes in your system, youre adding a lot of protocol overhead and code complexity with no real benefit. Similarly, if you require multihop and even mesh networking, 802.15.4 is a fine base. However, youre going to require something like ZigBee or 6LoWPAN to supplement what is provided. The 802.15.4 MAC protocol works best if you have two, three,

Figure 1: The traditional 7-layer OSI model.

Figure 2: An 802.15.4 star topology.

or even tens of devices (sensors/ actuators) reporting to a single centralised device (possibly an Ethernet gateway or central control device), where the child devices are battery-powered and need to spend the majority of time in a low-power quiescent state to maximise device longevity. The 802.15.4 PHY/MAC protocol can be a powerful tool to provide a simple out-of-the-box network-

ing solution. Keep in mind that it could be more than necessary or too simplistic, so its important to understand its full capabilities before settling on a solution. There is, of course, much that can be discussed about the IEEE 802.15.4 PHY/MAC protocol, beyond this basic introduction about the standards (ZigBee, 6LoWPAN, RF4CE) that build on it, but this is a first step.

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