Performance analysis of IEEE 802.15.6 MAC protocol in WBAN with energy harvesting nodes

Wireless Body Area Network (WBAN) have been widely used in many fields. With the development of energy harvesting technologies, applying energy harvesting (EH) nodes to WBAN becomes more practical. In this paper, a Discrete-Time Markov Chain (DTMC) model is built to analyze the IEEE 802.15.6 Medium Access Control (MAC) protocol under saturation condition in the WBAN with energy harvesting devices. The long term performance including through-put and energy consumption is then derived based on the statistical characteristics of the analytical model. The simulation results demonstrate the accuracy of the analytical model. A conclusion has been drawn from the results that a better energy harvesting state will make the system perform better, and the inuence of the energy harvesting state will be different for different priority nodes.