WBAN Performance Evaluation at PHY/MAC/Network Layer using Castalia Simulator

Abstract

WBANs are gaining acceptance in academia and industry due to their support for diverse applications, the most prominent of which is remote patient healthcare. With the tremendous effort directed for Smart healthcare solutions, WBANs are evolving side by side with cloud computing and IoT. With the changing technological scenario new communication standards, protocols and mechanisms are introduced to make WBANs acceptable. WBANs comprises of wearable/implanted sensors that monitor physiological parameters such as heartbeat, blood pressure, oxygen without restricting the patient in hospital environment. Because of WBANs, tele-medicine will experience a tremendous growth and efficient design and implementation will remain a focus of ongoing research. New Applications, energy conservation, MAC techniques, Routing protocols, security considerations are of major interest for the industry. As WBANs carries critical data so it is necessary that data should be delivered without loss with a smaller number of retransmissions. In addition to this the standard introduced for WBANs will gain attention and new healthcare products based on it will flood the market. WBANs has been implemented and tested through hardware using FPGAs and through software with the help of Simulators. Various Simulators has been used to evaluate the performance of WBANs including NS2, NS3, OPNET and Qualnet. In this paper we have implementation of WBANs on Castalia Simulator and evaluated its performance for 1 -hop topology. This paper presents the various results for Packet loss when transmission power, transmission rate and RAP periods are varied.