A novel IEEE 802.15.6 CSMA/CA service differentiation

IEEE 802.15.6 standard defines several service differentiation mechanisms with the aim of providing good QoS to different Wireless Body Area Network (WBAN) based applications including medical, entertainment, military, and security. The purpose of this paper is to improve IEEE 802.15.6 slotted CSMA/CA efficiency, making it more suitable for healthcare applications. To do so, we propose an enhancement to the 802.15.6 backoff assignment function. Then, we compare the native and improved channel access mechanisms in terms of reliability and throughput. Simulation results demonstrate that our proposal allows WBAN-based applications to benefit optimally and get better QoS than 802.15.6 features.