Performance Evaluation of IEEE 802.15.4 Ad Hoc Wireless Sensor Networks: Simulation Approach

This paper presents a preliminary performance investigation of the recently released IEEE 802.15.4 standard focusing on multiple sources and multi-hop peer-to-peer wireless sensor networks. This standard was developed to work in all-wireless environment supporting either peer-to-peer or star network topology. Since the release of IEEE 802.15.4, several efforts were made to study its performance where simple star network topology was the main focus. This literature attempts to extend existing efforts but focuses on evaluating the performance of peer-to-peer networks on a small scale basis using ns2 simulator. We analyze the performance based on commonly known metrics such as throughput, packet delivery ratio, and average delay. In addition, we propose ad hoc wireless sensor networks (AD-WSNs) paradigm as part of the extension to the IEEE 802.15.4 standard. From the experiments conducted we identified 'hidden node' problem in high-rate traffic as a soruce for performance degradation and proposed slot-based channel access as the potential solution.