Performance analysis of IEEE 802.15.4 with non-beacon-enabled CSMA/CA in non-saturated condition

This paper proposes an analytical model of IEEE 802.15.4, which is a standard toward low complexity, low power consumption and low data rate wireless data connectivity. In this paper, we concentrate on the MAC performance of the IEEE 802.15.4 LR-WPAN in a star topology with unslotted CSMA/CA channel access mechanism under non-saturated modes. Our approach is to model stochastic behavior of one device as a discrete time Markov chain model. We believe that many WSN applications would benefit from our analytical model because many applications in WSN generate traffic in non-saturated mode. We obtain five performance measures: throughput, packet delay, number of backoff, energy consumption and packet loss probability. Our results are used to find optimal number of devices satisfying some QoS requirements.