Impact of using CSS PHY and RTS/CTS Combined with Frame Concatenation in the IEEE 802.15.4 Non-beacon Enabled Mode Performance

This paper studies the performance improvement for the nonbeacon-enabled mode of IEEE 802.15.4 originated by the inclusion of the Request-To-Send/Clear-To-Send (RTS/CTS) handshake mechanism combined with frame concatenation. Under IEEE 802.15.4 employing RTS/CTS, the backoff procedure is not repeated for each data frame sent but only for each RTS/CTS set. The throughput and delay performance are mathematically derived for both the Chirp Spread Spectrum and Direct Sequence Spread Spectrum Physical layers for the 2.4 GHz band. The results show that the utilization of RTS/CTS significantly enhances the performance of IEEE 802.15.4 in terms of maximum throughput, minimum delay and bandwidth efficiency.