Investigation and performance analysis of MAC protocols for WBAN networks

Recently, interest in the Wireless Body Area Network (WBAN) for patient monitoring has grown significantly. Therefore, very interesting researches are concentrating on enhancing patient monitoring systems that require quality of services provisioning at different levels and especially in communication between WBAN nodes. Therefore, the conception of an efficient MAC (Medium Access Control) protocol is required to satisfy the stringent monitoring system requirements. In this context, investigations related to the most efficient and recent WBAN MAC protocols are carried out taking in consideration the requirements of WBAN MAC protocols, and the MAC proposals classification is presented in this paper. Furthermore, to illustrate the performance of the recently drafted IEEE 802.15.6 standard, IEEE 802.15.4 (Zigbee MAC) and TMAC protocols in different working conditions, we have elaborated different scenarios to simulate these protocols using CASTALIA framework and OMNET++ network simulator. Besides that, we have also computed the end-to-end delay (E2E) in the worst case for those protocols.