Performance analyses and improvement of the IEEE 802.15.6 CSMA/CA using the low latency queuing

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 standards 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 ensure a high quality of services (QoS), the standard defines many user priorities (UPs) for different types of data. This prioritization allows nodes with emergency packets to access the channel with high probability. Under saturation condition, the standard doesn't provide the manner in which the packets are queued and selected at MAC layer to be sent. In this paper, we study the performances of the IEEE 802.15.6 CSMA/CA in monitoring of an individual cardiac patient while using many queues strategies. To meet the objectives of the standard, we propose an adapted Low Latency Queuing (LLQ) scheme in order to improve the QoS. Over Castalia simulator based on OMNeT++, a comparative performances analysis between queuing strategies over the IEEE 802.15.6 standard has been conducted. Results of expanded simulations show that our queuing scheme performs the standard in terms of latency, energy consumption and packets delivery rate.