Wireless personal area networks (WPANs) are getting popular in a variety of fields such as smart home, office automation, and e-healthcare. In WPANs, most devices are considerably energy constrained, so the communication protocol should be energy efficient. The IEEE 802.15.4 is designed as a standard protocol for low power, low data rate, low complexity, and short range connections in WPANs. The standard supports allocating several numbers of collision-free guarantee time slots (GTSs) within a superframe for some time-critical transmissions. Recently, COPE was proposed as a promising network coding architecture to essentially improve the throughput of wireless networks. In this paper, we exploit the network coding technique at coordinators to improve energy efficiency of the WPAN. Some related practical issues, such as GTS allocation and multicast, are also discussed in order to exploit the network coding opportunities efficiently. Since the coding opportunities are mostly exploited, our proposal achieves both higher energy efficiency and throughput performance than the original IEEE 802.15.4. 1. Introduction Wireless sensor network (WSN) is a kind of network consisting of a collective of sensor nodes systematically connected by wireless radio. A sensor node may be equipped with one or several different sensors with different sensing abilities, for example, temperature sensing, light sensing, and pressure sensing. WSNs show great potential to and have been widely deployed for many applications involving monitoring, tracking, and controlling, such as home automation, environment monitoring, industrial and agricultural monitoring and controlling, and wild animal tracking. Yet there are still many challenge issues hindering the further development of WSNs. This is because most sensor nodes are constrained by their low processing capability, low memory spaces, and limited power supply. In addition, wireless sensor nodes are usually attached with radio transceiver with short-range communication capabilities. The transceiver is one of the most energy consumable parts. Hence, one key issue to tackle the challenge is to design a suite of communication protocols in a low complexity and enabling low-power connections between sensor nodes in WSN. Wireless personal area network (WPAN) is a kind of WSN, which has also been widely deployed in various automation systems, such as home/office automation systems and e-healthcare systems. WPANs have also drawn a lot of attention from both academia and industry. The IEEE 802.15.4 is a standard formed by the WPAN working
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