Performance analysis of IEEE 802.15.4 MAC Protocol for WSNs with ACK frame transmission under unsaturated traffic conditions

In this paper, we apply a discrete-time Markov Chain model to analyse the performance of IEEE 802.15.4 MAC Protocol with acknowledgement (ACK) frame transmission under unsaturated traffic conditions. We evaluate the system performance in terms of aggregate throughput and average power consumption of a node. Analytical results are substantiated through ns2 simulations. The effects of frame arriving rate, number of nodes and frame length, on the performance of the system are also discussed.