Performance Evaluation of IEEE 802.15.4 LR-WPAN for Industrial Applications

We present a number of performance studies of the IEEE 802.15.4 protocol. We put a special focus on application scenarios in industrial sensor network applications, which is one of the intended application domains for this protocol. The primary requirements are reduced end-to-end latency and energy consumption. Our studies are based on our new implementation of IEEE 802.15.4 developed for the simulation framework OMNeT++. We performed extensive simulations that demonstrate the capabilities of this protocol in the selected scenarios but also the limitations. In particular, we investigated the dependency of the protocol on protocol-inherent parameters such as the beacon order and the superframe order but also to different traffic load. Our results can be used for planning and deploying IEEE 802.15.4 based sensor networks with specific performance demands.