Analytic Modeling of the Coexistence of IEEE 802.15.4 and IEEE 802.11 in Saturation Conditions

With the increasing deployment of smart wireless devices using different technologies such as IEEE 802.15.4 and IEEE 802.11 which operate in the same frequency band, it becomes urgent to deeply understand the impact of this coexistence on the performance of the involved networks. We present in this letter an analytic framework based on Markov chains that captures accurately the behavior of channel access mechanisms in IEEE 802.11 DCF and the unslotted IEEE 802.15.4 when both technologies are coexisting together. The model allows the derivation of metrics such as the probability of successful transmissions, the probability of collision, and the fraction of time that the channel is idle, or experiences successful transmissions for both 802.11 and 802.15.4 nodes. Through extensive simulations of diverse coexistence scenarios, we validate the accuracy of the proposed model, and we analyze the performance of both 802.11 networks and 802.15.4 networks in saturation conditions.