Performance Analysis for a Body Area Network composed of IEEE 802.15.4a devices

Body area networks (BANs) are wearable wireless sensor networks with a high potential for medical and sports applications. BANs appear to be a particularly appealing solution to provide information about the health status of a patient in medical environments such as hospitals or medical centres.This work analyzes the behaviour of a BAN composed of IEEE 802.15.4a ultra wideband (UWB) sensors. A body area network architecture is proposed and investigated by simulation. Performance evaluation takes into account bit error rate as a function of the number of nodes forming the BAN and of the asynchronism level between them.