Performance analysis of beacon-enabled IEEE 802.15.4 MAC for emergency response applications

IEEE 802.15.4 standard provides a viable MAC and PHY specification for wireless sensor networks. Performance evaluation of these networks has been reported in literature. Previous works focus largely on analyzing the CSMA/CA traffic and frame delay due to Guaranteed Time Slots (GTS) allocations. In this work, we propose a analytical model to understand and characterize the performance of GTS traffic in IEEE 802.15.4 networks for emergency response situations. We study two crucial performance metrics, latency and frame drop rate, for GTS frames. The results from our analysis closely match with those from simulations of IEEE 802.15.4 MAC reported earlier.