An analytical model for deriving receiver sensitivity and minimum transmit power in 802.15.6 wireless body area networks

This paper proposes a comprehensive analytical model for deriving receiver sensitivity and minimum transmit power in 802.15.6 wireless body area networks (WBANs). Formulas derived for both receiver sensitivity and minimum transmit power are determined by the signal-to-noise (SNR) ratio at the output port of the receiver, the noise floor, and the receiver noise figure. Minimum transmit power also depends on the path loss between the transmitting and receiving antennas. Six propagation channel models at 2.45 GHz proposed for WBANs are considered in this study. Numerical results for 2.4 GHz narrow band (NB) physical layer of 802.15.6 show that different combinations of modulation type, packet size and target packet error rate (PER) will cause only a slight impact on the required energy per bit to noise power spectral density ratio, mostly less than 3 dBm, which is directly related to the receiver sensitivity. After taking the data rate into considerations, the changes of sensitivity will still be less than 10 dBm. In contrast, the path loss differences produced by different channel models can cause very large deviations of the minimum transmit power; sometimes it may exceed several tens of dBm.