Channel and Error Modeling for Wireless Body Area Networks

Wireless Body Area Networks (WBANs) have been developed as the human-body monitoring systems to predict, diagnose, and treat diseases. Since the signal transmission in WBANs takes place in or around the human body the channel fading significantly affects packet error rate and overal network performance. In this work, we discuss the channel models and error performance formalization for WBANs. In the first phase of this work, we study channel fading models for WBANs. In the second phase, we survey the models which calculate the error performance metrics in WBANs. We select most appropriate error models to design and develop the error performance evaluation models for IEEE 802.15.6-based WBANs and show how to integrate them with the error model in Medium Access Control (MAC). We then discuss integrated PHY and MAC error performance in WBANs.