Performance evaluation of IEEE 802.15.4 and IEEE 802.15.6 for wireless body area network

The development of health monitoring systems has generated considerable interest among researchers in WBAN. The WBAN require a MAC protocol that aligns with BAN principles and fulfills specific requirements. However, designing an efficient MAC protocol for WBAN is challenging due to the distinctive attributes of the wireless channel and the need to minimize energy consumption. This paper aims to comprehensively analyze the performance of MAC protocols specifically designed for WBAN. To achieve this, under different scenarios, we evaluate the performance of two widely used MAC protocols, namely IEEE 802.15.4 (ZigBee MAC) and IEEE 802.15.6 (Baseline MAC). We utilize the Castalia-3.2 framework and the OMNet++ simulator to conduct our evaluations. We assess the performance of these MAC protocols in two configurations: GTS ON, which combines CSMA/CA and TDMA, meanwhile GTS OFF, which employs only the CSMA/CA access mechanism. The simulation results demonstrate that the MAC protocol incorporating CSMA/CA and TDMA outperforms the MAC protocol based solely on CSMA/CA.