Performance analysis of wireless body area network MAC protocol

Abstract

Use of wireless sensors networks has been common for monitoring and treatment of the human beings. With the increasing number of aging people, continuous health monitoring is crucial. Integration of low-powered and light-weight sensors nodes leads to the requirement and development of Wireless Body Area Networks (WBAN). Recently, Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineering (IEEE) introduced the new standard IEEE 802.15.6 for body area communication. The goal of the new standard is to specify several physical layers and medium access control mechanisms for a variety of applications with various QoS requirements. Performance analysis is a basic step to evaluate a system. In this work, we evaluated the performance of the Wireless Body Area Network (WBAN) medium access control (MAC) protocol. At first, the performance of the IEEE 802.15.6 is evaluated in terms of throughput, energy efficiency, and power consumed under saturation condition. In addition, the performance is also evaluated under non-saturation condition. We develop an analytical model to evaluate the performance of CSMA/CA based protocol during contention access phases. To verify the numerical results obtained from analytical model, we perform simulations in homogeneous and heterogeneous environments. In the homogeneous environment, we obtain the results by assuming the network with nodes of a single user priority (UP). In the heterogeneous environment, we assume the nodes with 8 different user priorities (UPs). Our results show that under both homogeneous and heterogeneous environment the analysis and simulations reasonably match.