Performance evaluation of an IEEE 802.15.4 cognitive radio link in the 2360-2400 MHz band

In this paper, we analyze the performance of an IEEE 802.15.4 radio link in the 2360-2400 MHz band to support the ongoing Medical Body Area Network (MBAN) standardization activities in IEEE 802.15. There has been a lot of interest recently in opening the 2360-2400 MHz band for secondary allocations to promote MBAN innovations by providing a spectrum with less interference. In this work, we characterize the primary services in this band, focusing on Electronic News Gathering/Outside Broadcasting (ENG/OB) and Aeronautical Mobile Telemetry (AMT) systems. We study the performance in terms of the Packet Error Rate (PER) of an 802.15.4 MBAN radio link implemented on a Universal Software Radio Peripheral 2 (USRP2), in the presence of interference from these systems. A cognitive radio approach is proposed by implementing a spectrum sensing engine based on energy detection on USRP2. Our measurement results show an improvement in the performance of the radio along with primary user protection. In addition, an analytical expression for the packet error rate of the MBAN radio link with spectrum sensing is provided for a given Primary User (PU) activity, which matches well with the measured performance results.