Variable Spread Slotted Aloha Simulation Analysis over IEEE 802.15.6 Using IR-UWB for Wireless Body Area Networks

Recently, IEEE 802.15.6 standard has been established to optimize low-power in-body/on-body nodes to serve a variety of medical and non-medical Wireless Body Area Networks (WBAN) applications. Coexistence of medical and entertainment sensors in the near vicinity is a challenge in terms of Quality of Services (QoS) guaranteeing and interference mitigation. In order to improve the channel utilization by increasing the number of allowable transmission, enhancing overall performance, and enabling integration of different services, we propose to combine Direct Sequence-Ultra Wide Band (DS-UWB) with slotted-Aloha random access. In this paper, we investigate the performance of the proposed spread slotted Aloha for IEEE 802.15.6 Standard in different processing gain scenarios and different channel models. Results indicate that relation between medical and entertainment spreading code length combined with the sensor´s contention probability has the strongest effect on the system performance over the different channel models.