A Realistic MAC and Energy Model for 802.15.4

The IEEE 802.15.4 standard defines the physical and media access control layers for LR-WPANs (Low-Rate Wireless Personal Area Networks), and is one of the enabling technologies for Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) as well as the emerging Internet of Things (IoT) applications. The ns-3 network simulator offers support for simulating LR-WPANs as specified by the IEEE standard 802.15.4 (2006). However, only the ad-hoc mode is currently supported and many important features of the MAC such as radio duty cycle management are missing from the implementation. Moreover, at the moment ns-3 does not support simulating the energy consumption of LR-WPAN devices. Since energy efficiency is an important consideration for WSN and IoT applications, support for accurate energy modeling is highly desirable in order to develop energy-aware protocols for such applications. In this paper, we present the models developed for simulating the energy consumption of nodes in LR-WPANs. Further we implement the ContikiMAC radio duty cycling protocol in order to provide a realistic 802.15.4 compliant MAC layer which supports sleep/wake mechanisms.