Performance analysis of the beacon-enabled operation of IEEE 802.15.4 under WBANs

Abstract

Recently, the applicability of IEEE 802.15.4 standard over Wireless Body Area Networks (WBANs) has attracted increasing interest due to some of its key features such as energy efficiency, scalability and design flexibility. However, it is unable to support high data rate applications (>250 Kbps), whereas the overall traffic load in a WBAN may vary over a wide range. Since the operation of this norm depends on different MAC parameters, it will be useful to understand how these parameters affect the performance of the deployed networks, and if it is possible to improve the performance of this norm under high data rates conditions just by manipulating the configuration of MAC parameters, which form the focus of this paper.