Performance Evaluation of IEEE 802.15.4 for Wireless Body Area Network (WBAN)

IEEE 802.15.4 is a current major technology for low-rate low-power wireless networks. To study the applicability of IEEE 802.15.4 over a wireless body area network (WBAN), in this paper we evaluate its three different access schemes´ performance through several metrics. Considering the coexistence of contention access period (CAP) and contention-free period (CFP), we also study the mutual influences of these two traffics. The results show the unslotted mode has better performance than the slotted one in terms of throughput and latency but with the cost of much power consumption. In addition, the guaranteed time slot (GTS) in CFP can not guarantee the successful transmission of the CFP frames without sufficient GTS allocation. Finally, we give the suggestions for the novel medium access control (MAC) design for a WBAN.