Performance Evaluation of IEEE 802.15.4 LR-WPAN for Industrial Applications

The authors present a number of performance studies of the IEEE 802.15.4 protocol. They 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. The studies are based on the new implementation of IEEE 802.15.4 developed for the simulation framework OMNeT++. They performed extensive simulations that demonstrate the capabilities of this protocol in the selected scenarios but also the limitations. In particular, they 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.