Abstract—Recent advances in wireless technology have led to the development of wireless body area networks (WBAN), where a set of communicating devices are located around the human body. These networks have stringent technical requirements and to suite these requirements proper communication standard is required. Out of the available communication standards, IEEE 802.15.4 seems to be the suitable candidate for BAN. In this paper we have verified the suitability of 802.15.4 standard particularly scalability of MAC for single as well as multiple BAN in terms of throughput, power consumption and delay . The results show that non beacon mode gives best results but at the expense of power consumption. The beacon mode with GTS is suitable for low data rates but with increased data rate the performance of 802.15.4 get worsened and the throughput started deteriorating. Finally this paper suggests for improvement in the MAC layer particularly the superframe structure of existing IEEE 802.15.4 standard.

Index Terms—CAP, CFP , IEEE802.15.4 , WBAN, WPAN.

Pradnya H. Ghare is with VNIT, Nagpur, India (email:ghareph22@gmail.com)

Cite: Pradnya H. Ghare, A. G. Kothari, and A. G. Keskar, "Evaluation of Scalability Issue of 802.15.4 MAC for Body Area Networks," International Journal of Computer and Electrical Engineering vol. 4, no. 5, pp. 718-721, 2012.