Throughput, energy consumption, and energy efficiency of IEEE 802.15.6 body area network (BAN) MAC protocol

Low-powered and light-weight sensor nodes will be deployed for e-health services in wireless body area networks (WBANs). Recently, the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineering (IEEE) introduced a new standard, IEEE 802.15.6 for wireless body area communications. The goal of this standard is to specify several physical layers (PHY) and medium access control (MAC) layer protocols for variety of applications with various QoS requirements. In this paper, we evaluate the performance of the IEEE 802.15.6 WBAN MAC protocol in terms of throughput, power consumption, and energy efficiency under unsaturated conditions. We develop a discrete-time Markov chain based analytical model to evaluate the performance of CSMA/CA based WBAN MAC protocol during contention access phases. To verify the numerical results obtained from analytical model, we performed simulations and compared the results.