Performance evaluation of IEEE 802.15.4e DSME MAC protocol for wireless sensor networks

Abstract

In this paper, we evaluate performance of time synchronized multi-channel MAC protocol called DSME for wireless sensor networks. DSME MAC enhances IEEE 802.15.4 MAC specification, which provides backward compatibility and adds new features such as multichannel extension to the current single channel based superframe structure; enhancing peer-to-peer communications. Our numerical results show that throughput of DSME MAC protocol is 12 times higher against IEEE802.15.4-2006 slotted CSMA/CA in a multi-hop network with a 5×5 square grid device deployment. Energy consumption of DSME MAC protocol remains constant as the number of endpoint devices increases, while that of slotted CSMA/CA increases exponentially in star device deployment, thus, life span of a device can be increased substantially by employing DSME MAC protocol for the applications with large number of endpoint devices such as smart metering and infrastructure monitoring.