Performance of IEEE 802.15.4 beacon enabled PAN with uplink transmissions in non-saturation mode - access delay for finite buffers

In this work, we derive the probability distribution of access delay and calculate throughput of a personal area network operating under the IEEE standard 802.15.4 in the beacon enabled mode. We model the network using the theory of discrete time Markov chains and M/G/1/K queues. The model considers acknowledged uplink transmission in non-saturation mode, and includes the impact of different parameters such as packet arrival rate, number of stations, the finite size of individual node buffers, packet size, and inactive period between the beacons. Our model also captures the problem of congestion at the beginning of the superframe due to multiple transmissions delayed from the previous superframe. The results show that average access delays, even for small buffer sizes, may be quite high if the throughput exceeds 50%, which can seriously affect applications with delay bounds. Values of throughput larger than 50% can be achieved at the expense of larger buffer sizes, which imposes implementation problems on devices with small memory resources.