Performance Evaluation of IEEE 802.15.6 MAC in Monitoring of a Cardiac Patient

摘要

Recent advances in wireless communication and electronic manufacture have allowed the creation of a variety of bio-sensors to be used for Wireless Body Area Networks (WBANs). These devices operate in close vicinity to, on or inside a human body. WBANs have gained much interest and became emerging technology in health monitoring due to its wide range of use in improving the human health. Many earlier wireless technologies were used for the transport of medical data both to and from medical devices but these standards were not appropriate for wireless communication around the human body. The first international WBANs standard was established by the Task Group 6 and called IEEE 802.15.6. The standard defines a Medium Access Control (MAC) layer that supports several Physical layers. To estimate, compare and contrast performances of different wireless technologies, many medical use-cases representing a board of typical healthcare scenarios were defined in the standard ISO/IEEE 11073 for Point-of-Care (PoC) medical devices. In this paper, we study the performances of the IEEE 802.15.6 CSMA/CA using user priority (UP) scheme in the monitoring of an individual cardiac patient while satisfying the ISO/IEEE 11073 constraints. A comparative performance analysis between the IEEE 802.15.6 based communication system using UP and the IEEE 802.15.4 based communication system has been carried. Over Castalia simulator based on OMNeT++, the results show that the IEEE 802.15.6 outperform the IEEE 802.15.4 in terms of latency, energy consumption and packets delivery rate. Expanded simulations of the IEEE 802.15.6 standard show that: the EAP and RAP phases' length and UPs values are important factors to improve WBANs performances.