On the Impact of Clear Channel Assessment on MAC Performance

— Clear Channel Assessment (CCA) is an essential ingredient in wireless networks employing channel sensing as part of their medium access mechanism. While CCA itself is implemented at the PHY layer, the primary impact of its performance/complexity is on MAC metrics like throughput and energy efficiency; this cross-layer dependency makes it necessary to enhance MAC protocol performance evaluation by considering the specifics of CCA implementation that are naturally linkdependant. We perform such a cross-layer evaluation of the impact of CCA on MAC performance for the specific case of IEEE 802.15.4 standard for WPANs and derive some heuristics to choose the type of CCA and its parameters based on traffic and channel conditions to realize improved MAC performance.

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2006
• Where: GLOBECOM
• Authors: Iyappan Ramachandran, Sumit Roy
• Keywords: CCA Implementation, GLOBECOM 2006, MAC Performance, MAC Protocol Performance, Telecommunications