Impact of MAC parameters on the performance of IEEE 802.15.4 MAC protocol with ACK frame transmission

IEEE 802.15.4 medium access control (MAC) specifications support an optional feature of MAC-level acknowledgements and frame retransmissions to ensure reliability in data transmission. In this paper, we propose a generalised analytical model, which is based on a three-dimensional, discrete-time Markov chain, to analyse the performance of the IEEE 802.15.4 MAC protocol with retransmission and MAC-level acknowledgements under unsaturated traffic conditions. The network performance is evaluated in terms of aggregate throughput, average power consumption of a node, frame discard ratio and frame delivery ratio. Based on our results, we discuss the impact of different MAC parameters on the performance of the network.