Patent attributes
Techniques for providing additional timing information in periodic beacons in a network to enable battery powered devices to determine more appropriate listening windows for receiving the periodic beacons are described herein. In some examples, the battery powered devices use the additional information to determine more accurate listening windows based on a drift time of their internal clocks, and a jitter time of the network and/or a Coordinated Universal Time (UTC). Additionally, techniques for modifying when mains powered devices update their internal clocks based on transmission of beacons to downstream devices are described herein. For instance, the mains powered devices may refrain from updating their internal clocks to an updated network reference time until transmission of downstream beacons have occurred. In this way, timing synchronization of devices in a network may be improved, and battery life of battery powered devices in the network may be extended.
