Design and performance of contention based MAC protocols in WBAN for medical ICT using IR-UWB

This paper focuses on wireless body area networks (WBAN) targeted for medical ICT applications. The studied network follows a typical IEEE 802.15.4 beacon-enabled star topology. We simulate the collection of medical data from patients using wireless sensors. Impulse radio ultra wideband (IR-UWB) is chosen as a physical layer technology, in compliance with the IEEE 802.15.4a standard. Two random access methods, slotted Aloha (S-Aloha) and preamble sense multiple access (PSMA) are studied in terms of throughput and energy consumption. This paper has two main objectives: 1) to address realistic performance of the two selected MAC protocols, accounting for false alarm, miss-detection and capture effect, when using IR-UWB; 2) to obtain feedback information on the design of medical networks that use the IEEE 802.15.4 beacon-enabled star topology. Therefore, the performances are obtained increasing the number of active sensors, varying in parallel typical superframe parameters as beacon order and superframe order to test the reaction of the network at the introduction of an inactive period.