802.15.4: The Effect of Different Back-off Schemes on Power and QoS Characteristics

IEEE 802.15.4 LR-WPAN is intended as a specification for low-cost, low-powered networks with no critical concerns about throughput and latency. These features enable applications in the fields of industrial, agricultural, vehicular, residential and medical sensors as well as actuators, such as wireless monitoring and control of lights, security alarms, motion sensors, thermostats and smoke detectors, which cannot make use of current wireless technologies or have to use proprietary solutions. However, when dealing with wireless networks, optimized power management and better QoS characteristics are always a topic of great importance. In this paper, an evaluation of the effect of different back-off schemes of MAC algorithm, on power and QoS characteristics is presented.