Performance analysis of IEEE 802.15.4e DSME MAC protocol under WLAN interference

In this paper, we analyze the performance of IEEE 802.15.4e DSME-enabled wireless sensor network (WSN) and IEEE 802.15.4 beacon-enabled WSN employing slotted CSMA/CA in terms of frame error rate and aggregate throughput under the influence of IEEE 802.11b wireless LAN (WLAN) interference. The main purpose of this paper is to provide helpful information in the design of DSME-enabled WSNs in the presence of WLAN interference. Our numerical results show that DSME MAC protocol is resilient to large variance of traffic load conditions (Λ_wlan) and interference power level of WLAN. It is observed that the dominant interference source is homogeneous WSN devices in IEEE 802.15.4 WSN employing slotted CSMA/CA for small value of Λ_wlan, while WLAN devices are always the dominant interference sources in DSME-enabled WSNs regardless of Λ_wlan. Meanwhile, it is observed that DSME-enabled WSN retains high aggregate throughput value for large range of interference power level, while the aggregate throughput of IEEE 802.15.4 WSN employing slotted CSMA/CA degrades severely as the WLAN device approaches to WSN devices.