Theoretical Modelling IEEE 802.15.4 MAC Protocol with Retransmission for Wireless Personal Area Networks in Medical and Healthcare Deployment

Abstract

Though, Wireless Sensor Networks have many successful applications in military, smart building, habitat monitoring, etc. it just begun to show its superiority in the medical domain in recent years. Deployment of WSNs in medical domain exert many more stringent requirements on the capability of sensing and in-networking processing, due to the nature of high accessibility and the privacy sensitive requirement of medical environment, the application of WSN such as Wireless Personal Area Network (WPAN) must be carefully examined before practical use. This paper considers the performance of WPANs under different scenarios, which are the WSNs deployed in the medical and healthcare domains. It focuses on the behaviour of sensor nodes while accessing the shared channels during communicating each other. The channel access mechanism described as the slotted CSMA with collision avoidance (CA) in the network compliant the IEEE 802.15.4 standard are often investigated by the Markov chain modelling technique used in many complex systems. The performance matrices provide many insights to the technical designers and service users of WPAN systems.