Fundamental MAC Performance Evaluation under Multiple IEEE802.15.6ma BAN Co-Existence

Development of wearable devices has been remarkable with the rapid spread of short-range wireless communications. Especially, vital data measurement using wearable devices in wireless body area networks (BANs) has been attracting a lot of attention. The physical (PHY) and medium access control (MAC) layer specifications for BANs were standardized in the IEEE 802.15.6 task group (TG) 6ma. The IEEE 802.15.6ma standard could provide a good solution for a coexistence problem in BANs with highly dependable MAC architectures. In this study, we investigated the effectiveness of the MAC protocol based on the IEEE802.15.6ma standard under co-existence situation. Then, as a fundamental performance evaluation of our proposing MAC protocol for IEEE802.15.6ma, the performance such as packet error rate (PER), throughput and transmission delay time was evaluated by computer simulations.