Comprehensive performance analysis of IEEE 802.15.7 CSMA/CA mechanism for saturated traffic

IEEE 802.15.7 is a physical and MAC layer standard for visible-light communication. This paper thoroughly analyzes the carrier sensing multiple access with collision avoidance (CSMA/CA) mechanism of the MAC protocol of this standard. The nodal behavior of the CSMA/CA mechanism is modeled using a Markov chain. Performance parameters are derived for saturated traffic in a star topology network. The derived performance metrics of the network include throughput, transmission probability, collision probability, packet discard probability, delay, and power consumption. Furthermore in order to improve the obtained analytic results, a semi-analytic approach is developed. To verify the obtained results, CSMA/CA is completely simulated in a MATLAB environment, and network parameters are derived and compared with analytic models. Simulation results match the analytic ones very closely, which proves the validity of the proposed model.