Implementing 15.4e

We strongly believe IEEE802.15.4e is the most reliable and energy-efficient MAC protocol for low-power motes. This document will guide you through its implementation, highlighting the steps and providing tips and tricks. This guide is not targeted at a particular platform, but rather provides a discussion in plain English.

Intended Audience

This guide assumes the reader is an engineer or embedded programmer, who is familiar with C language application development on micro-controllers. Implementing IEEE802.15.4e requires playing with low-level features such as timer and interrupt registers. We will provide the core of the code you will need to get things working. While this is not simply a copy-and-paste project, we will point out what minor additional steps you will need to implement to ensure a proper implementation on your specific hardware platform.

How to Use this Guide

This guide is meant to be followed as the implementation progresses. We recommend you go over all the steps before you start implementing.

Checklist

These are the steps you'll be following, in order. We recommend you print this table and check the "done" boxes to see your progress.

step	description	done!
1	Overview
1a	- IEEE802.15.4e in a nutshell
1b	- Stack Integration
1c	- State Machine
1d	- Synchronization
1e	- Timeslot template
1f	- Schedules
1g	- Packet Format
1h	- Variables
1i	- FAQ
2	Debug environment
3	Adapting your timer drivers
4	Adapting your radio drivers
5	Sending Advertisements
6	Capture Reception Time
7	Adding Security
Appendix	Scope and sniffer traces

Help

If something in this guide isn't clear or if you are stuck, don't hesitate to contact  Thomas Watteyne or post an e-mail to the OpenWSN mailing list.

Enjoy!