Performance analysis of IEEE 802.15.4 MAC protocol for WSNs in burst error channels

A three-dimensional discrete-time Markov Chain model is applied to analyse the performance of the IEEE 802.15.4 MAC protocol under burst channel errors. Real world wireless sensor network conditions including unsaturated traffic, frame retransmission and acknowledgement (ACK) frame transmission are considered for the analysis. The system performance is evaluated in terms of aggregate network throughput, average power consumption per node, frame delivery ratio, and bytes-per-Joule capacity per node. Analytical results are validated through ns - 2 simulations. The effects of varying channel conditions and frame arrival rate on the performance of the system are also discussed.