Performance Evaluation of IEEE 802.15.4-based Wireless Body Sensor Networks: An Experimental Study

One of the most challenging issues in IEEE 802.15.4-based Wireless Body Sensor Networks (WBSNs) is the mutual interference caused by neighbouring WBSNs. As the number of co-located such sensor networks becomes larger in a frequency channel, the destructive impact of mutual interference becomes stronger and eventually causes significant performance degradation mainly due to inefficient channel utilisation. In this paper, we have proposed a new scheme called “dynamic-phase-shifting” in which a WBSN is able to shift its beacon packets to other phases (time slot) to eventually find a phase with reasonably higher performance gain. A set of performance measures along with two experimental scenarios are used to evaluate the performance of dynamic-phase shifting scheme compared to a baseline scheme that follows IEEE 802.15.4 protocol standard. The obtained results show that dynamic-phase-shifting scheme is not only feasible to be implemented on real sensor devices but also, it outperforms IEEE 802.15.4 standard in terms of the considered performance measures.