Topology Based Performance Analysis of IEEE 802.15.4 for Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless Local Area Networking standard (Wi-Fi) and the WPAN standard (Bluetooth and Zigbee) products utilize the same unlicensed 2.4 GHz ISM band. Co-existence between such wireless technologies within the same frequency spectrum is crucial to ensure that each wireless technology maintains and provides its desired performance requirements. Wireless Personal Area Networks are formed using tiny sensor devices which have several resource constraints. A new standard IEEE 802.15.4 was uniquely designed to suit personal wireless networks requirement consuming low power, provides low data rate and low cost. In this paper, an effort is made to analyze the performance of IEEE 802.15.4 in heterogeneous simulation environment.