Performance evaluation of IEEE 802.15.6 MAC in WBANs - A case study

IEEE 802.15.6 standard has emerged as the most suitable standard that fits the special requirements of WBANs. Although the published IEEE 802.15.6 standard draft provides flexibility to designers by recommending the use of several MAC layer techniques, it does not specify how to combine some or all of these recommended techniques to form the most efficient WBAN MAC for a specific scenario. Our main objective here is to combine various MAC techniques in an adaptive way that takes into consideration the types of sensors, their number, and their traffic and energy requirements. The performance of the proposed techniques will be evaluated using some of the standard performance measures such as throughput, delay and energy consumption.