Experimental Characterisation of an IEEE 802.15.6-Based Body Area Network

This paper presents the implementation of Carrier Sense Multiple Access with Collision Avoidance (CSMA/CA) Medium Access Control (MAC) protocol based on the IEEE 802.15.6 standard on a hardware platform developed for Wireless Body Area Network (WBAN) applications. The CSMA/CA allows each node to detect an ongoing transmission and consequently wait until the channel is idle. A testing campaign has been conducted in order to evaluate the performance of the protocol in terms of packet loss rate, average packet delay and network throughput