Adaptive Data Rate Control for Throughput Improvement and Energy Efficiency in Low Rate WPAN

Energy Efficiency is one of the key issues in Low Rate Wireless Personal Area Networks (LR-WPANs). So far, many research papers have been published on the subject of energy efficiency. However, the throughput in LR-WPAN hasn’t been extensively investigated. Therefore, in this paper, we focus on improving the throughput and energy efficiency. LR-WPAN is designed for short range wireless communication based on low power consumption and low cost. In this type of network, the communication capacity may be limited by the low HW specifications such as the small memory size (e.g. network interface buffer) and low processing capacity. In this study, we focus on the former limitation. In this situation, congestion occurs at the Cluster Head (CH) or coordinator owing to its small memory size, which may lead to packet dropping and a reduction of the overall performance. Therefore, we approached this problem from the viewpoint of improving the throughput. Network Devices should consider the congestion situation at the sensor nodes and adopt adaptive data rate control to avoid this situation. The improvement in the throughput and energy efficiency afforded by the adaptive data rate control scheme that is proposed in this paper is confirmed by the network simulation results.