Performance Analysis of CSMA/CA based on the IEEE 802.15.6 MAC Protocol

For satisfying requirements of the medical application, the IEEE 802.15 Task Group approved the IEEE 802.15.6 communication standard which is optimized for the low power device. In this paper, we analyze the performance of the IEEE 802.15.6 MAC protocol, in terms of throughput, delay-time and energy consumption under the saturation and unsaturation conditions. Considering the idle state of nodes, we presented a new three-dimensional Markov model to evaluate the performance of the Carrier Sense Multiple Access with Collision Avoidance (CSMA/CA) mechanism based on IEEE 802.15.6 MAC protocol. The simulation results show that when number of the nodes increase, the node with high use priority doesn't necessarily perform better than other nodes, and the packet arrive rate can influent the system's performance evidently. To verify the analytical results, we perform a simulation by OPNET simulator and compare the results.