Evaluating the IEEE 802.15.6 2.4GHz WBAN Proposal on Medical Multi-Parameter Monitoring under WiFi/Bluetooth Interference

Abstract

Wireless body area networks (WBAN) play a key role in the future of e-Health. In response, IEEE sets up working group 802.15.6 to standardize WBAN schemes. Of all existing standard proposals, the 2.4GHz proposal is the most mature and ready for mass production. However, as e-Health WBAN applications are often mission/life critical, people are concerned with the reliability (particularly, coexistence reliability) of this proposal. This study evaluates the 2.4GHz proposal under WiFi/Bluetooth interference in the context of medical multi-parameter monitoring. The authors conclude that WiFi poses a major threat to such application scenario, while Bluetooth does not.severe challenge of aging, as a consequence of long-lasting one-child policy (Kaneda, 2006).To curb the healthcare crisis, medical devices and systems must be upgraded to expand capabilities, increase efficiency, improve safety, and enhance convenience. One enabling technology to these goals is wireless body area networks (WBAN).A key application of WBAN is multi-parameter monitoring (i.e., monitoring multiple vital signs). For instance, during operation or

The Effects of Transmission Power and Modulation Schemes on the Performance of WBANs in on-Body Medical Applications

“…It is also the most mature band [18] which offers a larger bandwidth. Furthermore, it uses familiar PHY modules, that are already extensively applied in WiFi and Bluetooth [19], and adopts smaller antennas, which makes it ideal for the majority of on body WBAN applications. All these features contribute to make the 2.4 GHz ISM band of IEEE 802.15.6, the most widely used band.…”

EIMAC: a multi‐channel MAC protocol towards energy efficiency and low interference for WBANs

“…Silva et al [9] investigate inter‐user interference and come to a conclusion that packet delivery ratio (PDR) can be as low as 65% when the number of people exceeds five in a certain area and fall to 35% when there are more than eight people. Wang and Wang [10] analyse the influence of Wi‐Fi and Bluetooth on the performance of WBANs. This research turns out that the probability of packet loss and transmission failure increase when the distance between networks is small.…”

WiCop: Engineering WiFi Temporal White-Spaces for Safe Operations of Wireless Body Area Networks in Medical Applications

“…Among the technologies in the ISM band, ZigBee, Bluetooth, and the draft IEEE 802.15.6 2.4GHz standard suit WBANs the best due to their low power consumption, low radiation, and low cost [1]. However, all of them may suffer from coexistence interference from the nowadays pervasive WiFi (aka IEEE 802.11) networks [2][3] [4][5] [6], which run on the same ISM 2.4GHz band. Though the coexistence interference may not be a major concern for low duty-cycle non-critical applications such as body temperature monitoring [7], it is not the case for WBAN applications with stringent requirements on packet delivery ratio and/or latency.…”