Evaluation of IEEE 802.15.6 MAC user priorities with UWB PHY for medical applications

Wireless body area network (WBAN) is envisioned to became self-evident in future healthcare environments. One candidate to fulfill the reliably and efficiency requirements set by sending vital biomedical information is the novel IEEE 802.15.6 WBAN standard. In this paper, we study the effect of user priority scheme defined for different types of data in the IEEE 802.15.6 standard for medium access control (MAC) layer utilizing Slotted ALOHA channel access. A comparative performance analysis between the original IEEE 802.15.6-based communication system utilizing user priority scheme and a system utilizing a traditional random backoff scheme is presented in wireless hospital environment. Based on the results it can be stated that the performance of the IEEE 802.15.6 user priority scheme is approximately the same than the random backoff scheme in scenarios containing only high-priority medical data. However, in scenarios having both medical and low-priority nonmedical data transmissions the user priority scheme offers superior performance in terms of throughput and packet delivery ratio for medical applications.