Body Area Networks (BANs) are an emerging area of wireless personal communications. The IEEE 802.15.6 working group aims to develop a communications standard optimised for low power devices operating on, in or around the human body. IEEE 802.15.6 specifically targets low power medical application areas. The IEEE 802.15.6 draft defines two main channel access modes; contention based and contention free. This paper examines the energy lifetime performance of contention free access and in particular of periodic scheduled allocations. This paper presents an overview of the IEEE 802.15.6 and an analytical model for estimating the device lifetime. The analysis determines the maximum device lifetime for a range of scheduled allocations. It also shows that the higher the data rate of frame transfers the longer the device lifetime. Finally, the energy savings provided by block transfers are quantified and compared to immediately acknowledged alternatives

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Technological advancements have made possible the emergence of Body Area Networks (BANs). There are numerous on-body channel characterizations in the literature performed on a phantom or a single human subject. In this paper, using multiple subjects, we consider the effect of body shape and gender on the on-body channel. A characterization of a narrowband on-body to on-body channel among different subjects is presented. The paper investigates the relationship between the propagation and the subject's physical characteristics. The investigation is performed at 2360 MHz; the new medical band undergoing FCC approval. Our results show that the path loss in women is less than that in men and the level of fade is usually higher in men than women. They also show that involuntary movements along with respiration cause small-scale fading that follows the Rice distribution

Abstract. Medical body area networks will employ a range of implantable and body worn devices to support a wide range of applications with diverse QoS requirements. The IEEE 802.15.6 working group is developing a communications standard for low power devices operating on, in and around the body and medical devices are a key application area of the standard. The ISO/IEEE 11073 standard addresses medical device interoperability and specifies the required QoS for medical applications.This paper investigates the lifetime of devices using the scheduled access modes proposed by IEEE 802.15.6, while satisfying the throughput and latency constraints of the ISO/IEEE 11073 applications. It computes the optimum superframe structure and number of superframes that the device can sleep to achieve maximum lifetime. The results quantify the maximum expected achievable lifetime for these applications and show that scheduled access mode is not appropriate for all application classes such as those with intermittent transfer patterns.