Energy efficiency of IEEE 802.15.6 based wireless body area networks in scheduled access mode

In this paper, we evaluate the energy efficiency of IEEE 802.15.6 compliant Wireless Body Area Networks (WBAN) in scheduled accesss mode. We analyze the impact of superframe size, number of uploads per superframe, payload size, acknowledgement policy and the periodicity of allocations on the energy efficiency. Numerical evaluations show that energy efficiency can be improved by (i) increasing the number of uploads in the active superframe, and (ii) adopting block acknowledgement policy. It is observed that the payload size has significant impact on energy efficiency. We also evaluate the lifetime of the WBAN node and observe that the node lifetime can be improved by (i) increasing the superframe size; (ii) adopting block acknowledgement policy; (iii) reducing the number of uploads per superframe; and (iv) increasing the proportion of inactive superframes.