Performance enhancement of IEEE 802.15.4 by employing RTS/CTS and frame concatenation

IEEE 802.15.4 has been widely accepted as the de facto standard for wireless sensor networks (WSNs). However, as in their current solutions for medium access control (MAC) sub-layer protocols, channel efficiency has a margin for improvement, in this study, the authors evaluate the IEEE 802.15.4 MAC sub-layer performance by proposing to use the request-/clear-to-send (RTS/CTS) combined with frame concatenation and block acknowledgement (BACK) mechanism to optimise the channel use. The proposed solutions are studied in a distributed scenario with single-destination and single-rate frame aggregation. The throughput and delay performance is mathematically derived under channel environments without/with transmission errors for both the chirp spread spectrum and direct sequence spread spectrum physical layers for the 2.4 GHz Industrial, Scientific and Medical band. Simulation results successfully verify the authors’ proposed analytical model. For more than seven TX (aggregated frames) all the MAC sub-layer protocols employing RTS/CTS with frame concatenation (including sensor BACK MAC) allow for optimising channel use in WSNs, corresponding to 18–74% improvement in the maximum average throughput and minimum average delay, together with 3.3–14.1% decrease in energy consumption.