Throughput and delay limits of IEEE 802.15.6

Wireless Body Area Network (WBAN) is becoming increasingly important for ubiquitous healthcare, consumer electronics, and entertainment applications. WBAN provides unprecedented opportunities to monitor the health status of a patient with real-time updates to the physician. IEEE 802.15.6 is established to develop a wireless communication standard on WBAN. The aim is to optimize low-power in-body/on-body nodes to serve a variety of medical and non-medical applications. In this paper, we present numerical formulas to determine the theoretical throughput and delay limits of IEEE 802.15.6 networks for an ideal channel with no transmission errors. The limits are derived for different frequency bands and data rates. Additionally, to measure the spectral utilization, we analyze the bandwidth efficiency of IEEE 802.15.6 networks. The throughput, delay, and bandwidth efficiency results are presented as a function of payload size. The results of this paper can be used by protocol designers to optimize the packet size and to determine the upper bounds of IEEE 802.15.6 networks for different WBAN applications.