Abstract-For the first time, this paper presents an analysis of the performance of the IEEE 802.15.4 low power, low data rate wireless standard in relation to medical sensor body area networks. This is an emerging application of wireless sensor networking with particular performance constraints, including power consumption, physical size, robustness and security. In the analysis presented, the star network configuration of the 802.15.4 standard at 2.4 GHz was considered for a body area network consisting of a wearable or desk mounted coordinator outside of the body with up to 10 body implanted sensors. The main consideration in this work was the long-term power consumption of devices, since for practical reasons, implanted medical devices and sensors must function for at least 10 to 15 years without battery replacement. The results show that when properly configured, 802.15.4 can be used for medical sensor networking when configured in non-beacon mode with low data rate asymmetric traffic. Beacon mode may also be used, but with more severe restrictions on data rate and crystal tolerance.

Medical body area networks will employ both implantable and bodyworn devices to support a diverse range of applications with throughputs ranging from several bits per hour up to 10 Mbps. The challenge is to accommodate this range of applications within a single wireless network based on a suitably flexible and power efficient medium access control protocol. To this end, we present a Medical Medium Access Control (MedMAC) protocol for energy efficient and adaptable channel access in body area networks. The MedMAC incorporates a novel synchronisation mechanism and initial power efficiency simulations show that the MedMAC protocol outperforms the IEEE 802.15.4 protocol for two classes of medical applications.

Body Area Networks (BANs) are an emerging area of wireless personal communications. The IEEE 802.15.6 working group aims to develop a communications standard optimised for low power devices operating on, in or around the human body. IEEE 802.15.6 specifically targets low power medical application areas. The IEEE 802.15.6 draft defines two main channel access modes; contention based and contention free. This paper examines the energy lifetime performance of contention free access and in particular of periodic scheduled allocations. This paper presents an overview of the IEEE 802.15.6 and an analytical model for estimating the device lifetime. The analysis determines the maximum device lifetime for a range of scheduled allocations. It also shows that the higher the data rate of frame transfers the longer the device lifetime. Finally, the energy savings provided by block transfers are quantified and compared to immediately acknowledged alternatives

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