IEEE 802.15.6 under saturation: Some problems to be expected

Because currently available wireless technologies are not appropriate for wireless body area networks (WBANs), the IEEE 802.15.6 standard was introduced by the IEEE 802.15.6 Task Group to satisfy all the requirements for a monitoring system that operates on, in, or around the human body. In this work, we develop an analytical model for evaluating the performance of an IEEE 802.15.6-based WBAN under saturation condition and a noisy channel. We employ a three-dimensional Markov chain to model the backoff procedure as specified in the standard. Probability generating functions (PGFs) are used to compute the performance descriptors of the network. The results obtained from the analytical model are validated by simulation results. Our results indicate that under saturation condition, the medium is accessed by the highest user priority nodes at the vast majority of time while the other nodes are starving.