Modeling and Analysis of Additional Clear Channel Assessment to Improve Performance of IEEE 802.15.4-based MAC Protocol

Abstract

Design of the MAC protocol is crucial in all wireless sensor networks (WSNs) due to its influence on the performance of the transceiver, i.e. the most energy-consuming component of each sensor node. A mechanism known as “carrier sense multiple access with collision avoidance” (CSMA/CA) is used for accessing the wireless channel in the IEEE 802.15.4 standard-based MAC protocol in order to avoid collisions between the network’s communicating nodes. CSMA/CA relies on two clear channel assessments (CCA=2) for checking the status of the channel. In this paper, we develop an additional CCA algorithm for the two scenarios encountered in star topology-enabled WSNs. Next, we investigate the impact of an additional clear channel assessment (CCA=3) on performance in IEEE 802.15.4. We develop a Markov chain model for the proposed methodology, and validate it using Matlab. Simulation results show that there is a significant improvement of performance metrics in the IEEE 802.15.4 standard-based MAC protocol with an additional CCA