Modeling and parameter analysis of IEEE 802.15.4-based networks and the metering application

As the support of wireless sensor networks expands to various application scenarios, the communication environments and the performance requirements of different application scenarios vary a lot. To cope with different communication environments and performance requirements, both data transmission ability and medium access ability are equivalently important. In this article, a joint analytical model is proposed to fully and precisely estimate networks’ communication performance, energy efficiency, and scalability. In the proposed model, both the physical layer’s and medium access control layer’s key parameters are taken into consideration. By comparing with OPNET-based simulation model, the rationality of the proposed analytical model is first validated under a wide range of network scenarios. Then, a series of simulations under general network scenarios and metering network scenarios are conducted. With these simulations, the performance of adjusting both layers’ parameters in improving communication performance and energy efficiency was proved superior to single-layer’s parameter optimizations. Finally, by comparing the available range of different key parameters’ optimal value under different network scenarios, the maximum backoff numbers and the minimum backoff exponent are considered to be the most effective parameters for metering network optimization.