Partitioned Contention Access Mechanism to Enhance the Performance of IEEE 802.15.4 MAC Layer

In IEEE 802.15.4 beacon-enabled mode, performance decreases as the number of devices competing in the contention access period(CAP) increases. In this letter, we propose partitioned contention access mechanism(PCAM) to compensate performance degradation. In PCAM, the PAN coordinator divides CAP into two sub-periods and activity of devices is delimited in their assigned sub-periods. Since PCAM reduces the number of devices which compete at the same time by half, collision probability between transmitted frames can be reduced. In addition, devices can save their power consumption because PCAM shorten the duration that devices stay in active state into half. We perform simulations to compare the performance of PCAM with that of the IEEE 802.15.4 standard. From the result, PCAM yields better performance than IEEE 802.15.4 standard.