Performance Analysis Method for IEEE 802.15.6 Based WBANs with Adaptive BCH Code Rates

The IEEE 802.15.6 was established in Feb 2012 due to emergency of wireless body area networks (WBANs). In order to improve the performance of WBANs, the physical (PHY) layer, medium access control (MAC) layer and network layer have been discussed in a number of literatures. Although there are also many previous works on performance analysis for WBANs, a noise free was frequently assumed when contention error is taken into account in MAC layer. It means that in these works bit error rates (BERs) were not taken into consideration adequately. In this paper, we propose the Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) method to analyze performance in the PHY and MAC layers for WBANs, in which BERs are taken into consideration. The BERs are theoretically analyzed depending on different Bose–Chaudhuri–Hocquenghem (BCH) code rates, and then the BCH code rate for every sensor node is optimized in sense of the highest throughput while assuming the signal to noise ratio (SNR) of every sensor node is different. Furthermore, the dependence of throughput on the BER is clearly explained by calculating the access probability for every sensor node in large SNR region. The BCH code was adopted as an example and then adaptive BCH code rates for WBANs were proposed. The application of proposal method to other error correcting codes is straightforward. © 2016, Springer Science+Business Media New York.