QoS and energy consumption in wireless sensor networks using CSMA/CA

The greatest current challenge in wireless sensor networks consists in building a completely adaptive network without fixed infrastructures and with the smallest energy resources. Applications built upon such networks are various: from telemetry to medical follow-up and from intrusion detection to infrastructure maintenance. Nevertheless, their design requires a large effort to guarantee quasi unlimited lifespan of the network with a minimum QoS (quality of service). In this work, we propose a radio interference model which is combined with a Markovian model of CSMA/CA and permits to estimate power consumption and packet success rate in an IEEE 802.15.4 network.