Accurate Delay Analysis of Slotted IEEE 802.15.4 for Control Applications

To understand the fundamental performance limits and the quality of service offered by the IEEE 802.15.4 standard for control applications, the packet delay distribution plays a major role. Due to the random backoff mechanism employed by the IEEE 802.15.4 medium access protocol (MAC), it is difficult to derive such a distribution. In this paper, the probability distribution of the MAC layer service time and delay for successfully received packets are characterized. The analysis is based on an extended Markov chain and a moment generating function method.