With rapid advancements in sensing, networking, and computing technologies,
recent years have witnessed the emergence of cyber-physical systems (CPS) in a
broad range of application domains. CPS is a new class of engineered systems
that features the integration of computation, communications, and control. In
contrast to general-purpose computing systems, many cyber-physical applications
are safety-cricial. These applications impose considerable requirements on
quality of service (QoS) of the employed networking infrastruture. Since IEEE
802.15.4 has been widely considered as a suitable protocol for CPS over
wireless sensor and actuator networks, it is of vital importance to evaluate
its performance extensively. Serving for this purpose, this paper will analyze
the performance of IEEE 802.15.4 standard operating in different modes
respectively. Extensive simulations have been conducted to examine how network
QoS will be impacted by some critical parameters. The results are presented and
analyzed, which provide some useful insights for network parameter
configuration and optimization for CPS design.