Performance Analysis and a Proposed Improvement for the IEEE 802.15.4 Contention Access Period

IEEE 802.15.4-2003 [1] was introduced to address the market need for connecting low-rate devices in a wireless personal area network (WPAN). A slotted CSMA/CA medium access control (MAC) protocol is defined in the standard to coordinate the channel access of a large number of wireless devices. In this paper, we propose a novel Markov chain for IEEE 802.15.4 MAC, which faithfully captures all the essential features of the protocol, and thus can provide valuable insight into the strengths and weaknesses of this multiple access scheme. The evaluation reveals that the double carrier sensing mechanism specified in 802.15.4 MAC is not an optimal design, and a slight modification in the protocol can result in further performance improvement in terms of throughput, delay and energy efficiency.