Towards accurate mobility and radio link modeling for IEEE 802.15.6 wearable body sensor networks

In this paper accurate mobility and radio link modeling for intra-body communication is presented. The proposed enhanced mobility and radio link models introduce space and time variations to existing IEEE 802.15.6 channel models which can be used for better performance evaluation of new and existing algorithms and protocols. The contributions of this paper are in many folds. First, an accurate pathloss model is developed using real-time motion capture trace which provide dynamic distances for the space-time variations and temporal correlation in time. Further, the accurate mobility model is used to distinguish Line of Sight (LOS), Non Line Of Sight (NLOS) and periodic (or time varying) radio links. Second, a comprehensive radio link modeling approach is proposed, including the computations of SNR (Signal to Noise Ratio), BER (Bit Error Rate) and PER (Packet Error Rate) which are accurately evaluated after achieving realistic pathloss across all the links locations. Finally, we assess the impact of the proposed enhanced models on the performance evaluation of the IEEE 802.15.6 MAC protocol. The obtained results show between 10% to 30% lower packet delivery (depending on the considered mobility scenarios and physical layer parameters) due to accurate modeling.