Analysis of the contention access period of IEEE 802.15.4 MAC

✍ Scribed by Ramachandran, Iyappan; Das, Arindam K.; Roy, Sumit

• Book ID: 120992305
• Publisher: Association for Computing Machinery
• Year: 2007
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 601 KB
• Volume: 3
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 1550-4859
• DOI: 10.1145/1210669.1210673

✦ Synopsis

The recent ratification of IEEE 802.15.4 PHY-MAC specifications for low-rate wireless personal area networks represents a significant milestone in promoting deployment of wireless sensor networks (WSNs) for a variety of commercial uses. The 15.4 specifications specifically target wireless networking among low-rate, low-power and low-cost devices that is expected to be a key market segment for a large number of WSN applications. In this article, we first analyze the performance of the contention access period specified in the IEEE 802.15.4 standard in terms of throughput and energy consumption. This analysis is facilitated by a modeling of the contention access period as nonpersistent CSMA with backoff. We show that, in certain applications in which having an inactive period in the superframe may not be desirable due to delay constraints, shutting down the radio between transmissions provides significant savings in power without significantly compromising the throughput. We also propose and analyze the performance of a modification to the specification which could be used for applications in which MAC-level acknowledgements are not used. Extensive
ns
-2 simulations are used to verify the analysis.