BER performance comparison of IEEE 802.15.6 and IEEE 802.15.4 on PHY layer

Abstract

In this paper, Two communication protocol, IEEE 802.15.6 Wireless Body Area Network (WBAN) and IEEE 802.15.4 ZigBEE, which are designed for telemedicine field, have been studied. BER performances values of both standards are simulated using their individual physical layer profiles in Rayleigh fading and Additive White Gaussian Noise (AWGN) channels. The obtained performances are compared with each other. As a result of simulation in AWGN Channel, IEEE 802.15.4 communication protocol performs approximately 7 dB better in SNR - BER graph than IEEE 802.15.6 while in Rayleigh channel this difference increased up to 16 dB.