Study on a delayed backoff algorithm for IEEE 802.15.4 low-rate wireless personal area networks

IEEE 802.15.4 standard applies the slotted carrier sense multiple access with collision avoidance (CSMA/CA) for its contention mechanism in the contention access period (CAP). In CAP, channel utilisation is significantly affected by backoff time and collision. A delayed backoff algorithm (DBA) in CAP is proposed for the beacon-enabled networks. DBA improves the goodput and power consumption by decreasing the backoff time between packets and assuring that the different nodes will not finish their backoffs at the same time. Simulation results show that the proposed algorithm outperforms the slotted CSMA/CA and other schemes in terms of goodput and power consumption.