IEEE 802.15.6 compliant WBSN: A case study

The advances in wireless low-power sensors and the increasing demand for portable healthcare monitoring systems have inspired the realization of Wireless Body Sensor Networks (WBSNs). A WBSN is a collection of wearable and implantable sensors, associated to specific acquisition and control tasks, communicating with an aggregation central node, that processes the measurement data, extracts the clinical information, and if necessary forwards to a remote monitoring station. The IEEE Std. 802.15.6 defines the communication protocol for WBSN applications in terms of physical and medium access layers. In this context, the present paper focuses on the most suitable design of network configuration by considering how the occurrence of missing packets affects the resulting quality of service. Throughout numerical simulations in Matlab, we reproduce a plausible WBSN scenario for monitoring the cardiac activity during physical exercise. The effect of missing packets on the recovered electrocardiographic time-series at receiver side has been finally investigated, in terms of root-mean-square error and accuracy of the estimated heart rate, thus providing some criteria for choosing the most suitable network configuration.