IEEE 802.15.7 MAC under unsaturated traffic: Performance analysis and queue modeling

Visible light communication (VLC) is gradually gaining popularity as an alternative way to implement personal area networks (PANs)in the areas where the radio frequency spectrum is heavily populated. IEEE 802.15.7 greatly promoted the utilization of VLC in PANs. Because of the freshness of this standard, it has not yet been thoroughly investigated. In this paper, the medium access control (MAC) layer of IEEE 802.15.7 under unsaturated traffic is analyzed. First, a Markov chain model is presented to model the MAC layer of IEEE 802.15.7. Then, service time distribution of the MAC layer is extracted. An M/G/1 queue model is proposed to model the node behavior of the IEEE 802.15.7. Furthermore, a semi-analytic model is proposed to enhance the analytic model. To validate the proposed methods, the MAC behavior of IEEE 802.15.7 node is completely simulated. Throughput and queue parameters are extracted and compared with the proposed methods. Simulation results are in good agreement with the analytic and semi-analytic approaches.