QoS analysis of medium access control in LR-WPANs under bursty error channels

Low Rate Wireless Personal Areas Networks (LR-WPANs) have been widely deployed for the purpose of short range, low rate, and low power wireless networking. The IEEE 802.15.4 standard defines a Medium Access Control (MAC) layer protocol for LR-WPANs. The analytical models reported in the literature for 802.15.4 MAC have been mainly developed under the assumptions of ideal channels or uniform error channels, which fail to capture the characteristics of bursty and correlated channel errors in a practical wireless network environment. In this paper, we present an analytical model for 802.15.4 MAC in LR-WPANs in the presence of bursty error channels. This model can be used to obtain the Quality-of-Service (QoS) performance metrics, including throughput, service time, and frame delay. The accuracy of the model is validated through NS-2 simulation experiments. Utilizing the analytical model, we investigate the QoS performance of 802.15.4 MAC under various traffic loads, backoff parameters, numbers of nodes, and channel conditions. The analytical model is demonstrated to be a cost-effective tool for evaluating the QoS performance of 802.15.4 MAC in the presence of bursty error channels.