Abstract for ES496

This research looks into the capabilities of the Xbee RF module leveraging the Zigbee mesh network protocol in the automatic transmission mode (AT). It seeks to provide Midshipmen with a code base on mbed.org to help facilitate serial communications in future work on the Xbee systems. Supplementary to this was the capacity for these transmitters to allow multiple end nodes through randomizing time delay on transmission. Due to the flooding nature of the AT communications model, there is a large amount of overlap in packet delivery, causing the priory structure to single out one sender to receive from. To help offset this, we implemented a randomized time delay on each of the end nodes to allow time for the buffer to clear and mitigated almost all of the collisions. With this architecture we could receive parallel signals from 3 separate sensor nodes with seemingly no interference. The other unique aspect of this mode of communications was the connectionless routing. Afforded by the ZigBee protocol, none of the nodes needed to know the address of the coordinator and vice-versa. All of the coordination for the Xbee routing is done in the lower levels of the protocol and on the user/application level the only requirement is a congruent PanID.


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