Analytical model of multihop IEEE 802.15.4 for lossy medium

Wireless sensor networks (WSN) are used in many fields such as industrial control, building automation, environmental monitoring, etc. IEEE 802.15.4 standard defines the features of MAC layer and physical layer for WSN. Many analytical models studied the performance of the multihop IEEE 802.15.4 networks under the assumption of ideal wireless channel, and they did not consider the effect of imperfect wireless channel. This paper presents an analytical model for the IEEE 802.15.4 networks that joins the MAC layer and the physical layer and takes into account the lognormal shadowing, interference, hidden terminal and modulation type. The proposed model is implemented using MATLAB, and its performance is compared to the OPNET simulation tool. The node throughput is used as a metric to evaluate the behavior of the network. The results show that the consideration of the realistic channel conditions has a significant impact on the network performance compared to the ideal one. Our model gives very close results to that obtained by using OPNET.