An investigation into the effectiveness of IEEE 802.15.6 MAC access methods

Wireless body area network collects information from medical devices that monitor the physiological parameters of a human body. Energy constraints of medical devices and bounded latencies of medical applications are the chief QoS requirements of WBANs. With the standardization of the WBAN network, viz. 802.15.6 standard, mechanisms for medium access have been specified which can be skillfully manipulated to satisfy the needs of applications. This work attempts to combine polling and CSMA/CA as per 802.15.6 standard to investigate the intrinsic peculiarities of such a hybrid access method and the advantages it has, if any, over conventional CSMA/CA access method in terms of energy consumption, latency and throughput. The polling scheme uses an adaptive sleep schedule. This is basically a simulation study and the results show that for an appropriate ratio of RAP to polling period and a judicious distribution of the devices among the RAP and polling phases the QoS requirements of the devices with regard to throughput, latency and lifetimes can be satisfied substantially.