Prototype system based enhanced scheduled access mechanism for WBAN

Wireless Body Area Networks (WBANs) have attracted significant attentions because of their important role in medical applications with the development of requirements in health monitoring and diagnosis. IEEE 802.15.6, as the international standard for WBAN, supports network in operating on, in or around human body. Owing to the special propagation characteristics as affected by human body, WBAN needs reliable access mechanism to guarantee the stability of nodes access and information transmission. To achieve the high slot utilization rate and low average packet delay, we propose a gated scheduled access mechanism based on IEEE 802.15.6 and study the impact of allocation slot length on network performance. To examine the performance of our proposal, we conduct hardware experiment through a novel prototype system based on IEEE 802.15.6 standard. The experiment results show that the obtained optimal allocation slot length under the gated scheduled access mechanism can well satisfy the Quality of Service (QoS) requirements in different data rates, which is consistent with the results of theoretical analysis. The comparison results also show that our prototype system can be a practical reference in the future study of wireless body area network.