Performance analysis of IEEE 802.15.6 MAC protocol in beacon mode with superframes

Abstract

Wireless Body Area Networks (WBANs) are becoming increasingly important to solve the issue of health care. IEEE 802.15.6 is a wireless communication standard for WBANs, aiming to provide a real-time and continuous monitoring. In this paper, we present our development of a modified Markov Chain model and a backoff model, in which most features such as user priorities, contention windows, modulation and coding schemes (MCSs), and frozen states are taken into account. Then we calculate the normalized throughput and average access delay of IEEE 802.15.6 networks under saturation and ideal channel conditions. We make an evaluation of network performances by comparing with IEEE 802.15.4 and the results validate that IEEE 802.15.6 networks can provide high quality of service (QoS) for nodes with high priorities. © 2013 KSII.