A Novel Method for Service Differentiation in IEEE 802.15.4 : Priority Jamming

IEEE 802.15.4 employs carrier sense multiple access with collision avoidance (CSMA/CA), which is known to have difficulty for supporting quality of service (QoS). In this paper, a new priority scheme called priority jamming (PJ) is proposed for service differentiation for IEEE 802.15.4. The main idea of the proposed scheme is deferring the low priority packet transmission for the high priority packet. Clear channel assessment of IEEE 802.15.4 is modified to support the proposed PJ. The efficiency of the proposed scheme is validated by comparing the delay, throughput, and energy-per-bit with those of standard CSMA/CA. Simulations results showed that PJ improves the delay and throughput simultaneously while maintaining marginal difference in energy efficiency.