Performance Evaluation of IEEE 802.15.4 MAC in Beacon-Enabled Tree-Topology Wireless Sensor Networks

We investigate the performance of IEEE 802.15.4 MAC (Medium Access Control) sublayer in beacon-enabled tree-topology Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs). To our knowledge, current literature has mostly focused on relatively simpler star topology or non-beacon-enabled peer-to-peer networks. In our work, we first respectively evaluate the impact of different traffic loads from the source nodes in each depth. Then we investigate the network performance with respect to different beacon orders. In both scenarios, the effects of different number of hops between source nodes and the sink are evaluated. NS-2 simulation results reveal that the traffic loads play a more important role than beacon orders. Furthermore higher depths (hops) severely affect the network performance.