Modeling and throughput analysis for SMAC with a finite queue capacity

Abstract

SMAC is a popular duty-cycled MAC protocol, designed for wireless sensor networks to save energy and prolong the network lifetime. However, existing work evaluates the performance of SMAC solely through simulations or field measurements. To the best of our knowledge, there are no analytical models for evaluating the performance of SMAC. In this paper, we propose a Markov model to describe the behavior of SMAC with a finite queue capacity. This model enables us to find the expected throughput of SMAC under variable number of nodes, queue capacities, contention window sizes, and data arrival rates. We validate the model through extensive simulations, which provide throughput values within 5% of the throughput values obtained through our model. Our proposed Markov model can be used to estimate the throughput of SMAC under many different network and node conditions, and more importantly, it provides us with a better understanding of the way that different parameters affect the performance of SMAC.