Performance Evaluation and Delay-Power Trade-off Analysis of ZigBee Protocol

In this paper, we analyze the superframe structure of the Medium Access Control (MAC) sublayer of IEEE 802.15.4 protocol (ZigBee), designed for Low-Rate Wireless Personal Area Networks (LR-WPANs), and evaluate the effects of the inactive portion of a superframe on average delay, and average power consumption. The four-dimensional Markov chain-based analysis of the slotted Carrier Sense Multiple Access with Collision Avoidance (CSMA/CA) algorithm presented in this work considers backoff freezing and acknowledged packet transmission that are not studied in the existing works. The analytical results prove that the performance of LR-WPANs depends significantly on the length of a superframe's active portion. We introduce a variable-Superframe duration-Beacon interval Ratio (SBR), which is utilized by tuning a few MAC parameters to achieve 35 percent reduced delay, on an average, compared to the existing state of the art. The results show that the proposed model also yields improved performance in terms of power consumption, for short and medium contention windows. In addition to the proposed analysis, this work provides optimized superframe order values that achieve trade-offs between delay and power consumption as demanded by user-provided QoS requirements corresponding to different contexts.