Performance evaluation of ieee 802 15 6 mac with user priorities for medical applications

Abstract

In order to satisfy the heterogeneous service requirements from different applications and the complex channel characters owing to body motions, IEEE 802.15.6 standard was established as a new solution for Wireless Body Area Networks (WBANs). In this paper, we evaluate the effect of user priorities (UPs) on the performance of IEEE 802.15.6 CSMA/CA channel access mechanism in narrow band. Simulation metrics mainly focus on the normalized throughput and average packet delay in which the traffic arrival rate and traffic distribution vary. In addition, we make a comparison with the non-priority CSMA/CA in performance which concludes that the IEEE 802.15.6 with user priorities performs better in specific situation.