Simulation study of IEEE 802.15.4 LR-WPAN for industrial applications

The IEEE 802.15.4 protocol has become the primary solution for many low-rate wireless personal area network (LR-WPAN) applications. This is especially the case for industrial sensor network applications such as automation control. We contribute to the better understanding of the protocol behavior by presenting a set of results of simulation experiments. Our results outline 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. We put a special focus on application scenarios in industrial sensor network applications. 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++. Copyright (C) 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.