Enhanced back-off technique for IEEE 802.15.4 WSN standard

Abstract

IEEE 802.15.4 is the standard for Low-rate Wireless Personal Area Networks. The CSMA-CA algorithm used in the standard for channel contention causes performance bottlenecks in certain scenarios. We have conducted a performance evaluation of the back-off algorithm with the help of simulations on star networks and identified two parameters which affect the performance of the algorithm - macMinBE and macMaxBE. Further, we have also proposed an enhanced algorithm which involves these two parameters and improves the performance of the back-off algorithm. © 2014 Springer International Publishing Switzerland.