IEEE 802.15.4 is a standard designed for low data rate wireless personal area networks (WPANs) intended to provide connectivity to mobile devices. Such devices present considerable storage, energy, and communication constraints. However, they can be used in a variety of applications like home/office automation, environmental control and more. In order to extend the lifetime of the WPAN, we propose some changes to the standard including modifications to the Superframe Guaranteed Time Slot (GTS) distribution which can be optimized to reduce energy consumption. We implemented the proposed improvements to the IEEE 802.15.4 protocol using real sensor nodes. Specifically, we conducted an energy study of the proposed acknowledgment-based GTS descriptor distribution scheme and compared the results with the standard implementation. Experiments show that the proposed changes reduce energy consumption up to nearly 50% when 7 devices allocate guaranteed time slots descriptors during normal communication.