Report Success Probability/Battery Liftime Analysis of Dense IEEE 802.15.4-Based Metering Networks With Hidden Nodes

IEEE 802.15.4 and its amendments are among the leading candidates as enabling wireless technologies for metering networks. In a typical IEEE 802.15.4-based metering network, thousands of meter transceivers utilize CSMA/CA to send their metered data to a base station collector. With such enormous scale of devices competing for medium access, it becomes inevitable that meters might occasionally fail in reporting their data successfully. This could be attributed to consistent failure to grab access to the highly loaded shared medium or due to packet collision at the base station collector. Collisions occur due to synchronized channel access from meters within the same collision domain or due to hidden nodes across different collision domains. In this paper, a simple analytical model to evaluate the report success probability as well as meters’ battery lifetime within IEEE 802.15.4-based metering networks is introduced. The model quantifies the hidden node problem in terms of the average percentage of hidden transceivers with respect to each meter device within the network. Comparison with an OMNET++ simulation model shows that the presented analysis behaves as an upper bound on the report success probability. The model is then utilized for proper configuration of the IEEE 802.15.4 network given a target report success probability performance. It is shown that the expected battery lifetime of meters could be optimized by controlling the percentage of hidden nodes combined with proper setting of the maximum number of allowable backoff attempts by each meter.