Control superframe for high throughput of cluster-based WBAN with CSMA/CA

Due to rapidly increasing of elderly population all over the world and quickly developing of entertainment devices, wireless body area network (WBAN) attracts attention. For both medical and non-medical applications, a reliability, high energy-efficiency and high throughput of WBAN communication are requested. The well-known cluster-based is proposed to obtain the high energy-efficiency, however the transmission in every cluster is controlled on MAC layer by superframe in order to obtain the high throughput. The performance of original cluster-based, complete control and spatial reuse superframe scenarios is analyzed and compared. The calculation result indicates that the spatial reuse superframe outperforms the original cluster-based when the access probability and/or the total number of sensors are high. Furthermore, there are the optimal number of clusters, the access probabilities and the total number of sensors that achieve the highest throughput. The optimization method of number of spatial reuse superframe (k) is proposed to obtain the highest throughput when another factors change. k increases when another factors of system model increase, excepted the payload. The optimization method of another factors is similar and the proposed method can be applied to not only IEEE802.15.6 WBAN but also another cluster-based wireless sensor networks. © 2014 IEEE.