Analysis of Network Architectures for Zigbee Sensor Clusters

We provide a comparative performance analysis of network architectures for beacon enabled Zigbee sensor clusters using the CSMA/CA MAC denned in the IEEE 802.15.4 standard, and organised as (i) a star topology, and (ii) a two-hop topology. We provide analytical models for obtaining performance measures such as mean network delay, and mean node lifetime. We find that the star topology is substantially superior both in delay performance and lifetime performance than the two-hop topology