Optimizing Packet Generation Rate for Multiple Hops WBAN with CSMA/CA Based on IEEE802.15.6

Wireless Body Area Network (WBAN) is considered to apply to both medical healthcare and entertainment applications. A requirement for each application is different, i.e. high reliability for medical healthcare whereas high throughput for entertainment application. However, for both applications, low energy consumption is requested. Multiple hops technics have been researching in many fields of wireless system, e.g., ad hod, mobile, ITS etc. and its energy-efficiency is reported to be high. We propose the multiple hops technic for WBAN, however, WBAN is different to another systems, almost sensors forward the vital data packet of another sensors while sensing and generating the data packet of itself. Therefore, according to a packet generation rate of all sensors, probabilities of successful transmission and packet loss because of collision, timeout and overflow, are changed. It means that the vital data is lost and the transmit power is wasted due to packet loss. In order to obtain the highest throughput and save the power, the successful transmission probability is analyzed and the packet generation rate is optimized for multiple hops WBAN that using CSMA/CA based on IEEE802.15.6. The numerical calculation result indicates that the optimized packet generation rate depends on the system model. Moreover, the relation between the system model, the optimized packet generation rate and the throughput is discussed in the paper.