Error probability model for IEEE 802.15.4 wireless communications in the presence of co-channel interference

The IEEE 802.15.4 standard is the most widely used for the realization of Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) and Internet of Things (IoT) applications. The effects of various disturbances on IEEE 802.15.4 wireless transmissions in the 2.4 GHz band have been studied previously for background noise, multipath fading, wideband and narrowband interference caused by WiFi and Bluetooth networks. The influence of co-channel interference, which originates from collisions between IEEE 802.15.4 devices which perform simultaneous radio transmission, has not been investigated previously. The IEEE 802.15.4 standard uses the Carrier Sense Medium Access with Collision Avoidance (CSMA/CA) channel access mechanism to prevent collisions between devices, but this mechanism does not provide protection from a hidden node problem, which is the primary source of co-channel interference. Hidden node collision in the CSMA/CA channel access mechanism occurs because of the time-spatial relation between nodes located inside the radio range of the recipient device. In our paper, we determined the spatial probability for k-tuple of mutually hidden nodes using the Monte Carlo simulation method. Furthermore, we analyzed the influence of co-channel interference on the error probability of IEEE 802.15.4 communication, and derived accurate analytical models by considering the non-ideal features of the used spreading sequences. The accuracy of the derived mathematical models was tested by numerical Monte Carlo simulation of the IEEE 802.15.4 communication and in a real-world experiment using IEEE 802.15.4 compliant wireless transceivers for creating co-channel interference. The presented simulation and real world experiment results show consistency with the proposed analytical error probability models.