WBAN on hardware: Implementation and optimization based on IEEE 802.15.6

Abstract

Various current trends such as ever growing population have effectively promoted the growth of Wireless Body Area Network (WBAN). Most of the existing works in WBAN focus on theoretical performance enhancement, whereas works in implementation which is of significance in validation and further research are pretty rare. Therefore, a reliable and efficient system designed both in hardware and software based on the IEEE 802.15.6, named WBAN prototype system, is proposed and implemented in this paper. We constructed the prototype system from modules to system architecture, and conducted a set of experiments to verify the prototype system as well as optimize parameters in IEEE 802.15.6. The prototype system is ascertained to meet basic requirements in terms of quality of service indexes by extensive experiments, among which we further explored packet error rate and frame error rate that can be a reference for future WBAN studies.