A SURVEY ON PROTOCOL STACK FOR WIRELESS BODY AREA NETWORK

Tóm tắt

Wireless Body Area Network (WBAN) is a radio-frequency wireless network, with comparatively short coverage range. It consists of a potentially large number of low-power consumption devices with sensor or actuator functionality. Considering the capability of innumerous kinds of sensors, WBAN does have a lot of application scenarios around human body area, among which there is personal healthcare. When applied to scenarios like healthcare, WBAN may then interact with other networks in close proximity to largely extend its communications area. This paper presents a survey on ultra-low-power and low-rate version of WBAN by comparing two non-proprietary protocol stacks, namely ZigBee/IEEE 802.15.4 and Wibree. IEEE 802.15.6 and UWB are two others wireless technologies that can be applied in WBANs, yet each is oriented toward different application requirements. In scenarios where latency is a critical factor - such as arrhythmia detection, emergency alerts, or intraoperative monitoring - ultra-low latency must be prioritized, making IEEE 802.15.6 and UWB more suitable. Conversely, for less time-sensitive applications, including fitness tracking or periodic data collection, BLE and ZigBee provide more energy-efficient solutions. Wibree was initially referred to as Bluetooth Low-End Extension (LEE) and subsequently as Ultra-Low-Power (ULP) Bluetooth. To better illustrate Wibree, Bluetooth’s specifications is included into comparison whenever necessary. Moving from physical layer to application layer, we have compared different schemes employed by each protocol stack. After that, we investigated into the application of sensors, with the aim of interconnecting arrays of biomedical sensors.