ETSI SmartBAN System Performance and Coexistence Verification for Healthcare

European Telecommunications Standard Institute (ETSI) Technical Committee (TC) Smart Body Area Network (SmartBAN) defines and specifies low-power physical and medium access control layers for SmartBANs. Several use cases have been defined for SmartBAN, such as sleep monitoring, fall monitoring, and apnea monitoring. The specialist task force 511, working under ETSI TC SmartBAN, studied the performance of the system and evaluated coexistence with other wireless systems. In this paper, the simulator model based on the SmartBAN specification is introduced. Based on the simulation results, the receiver sensitivity for the SmartBAN system is defined. In addition, the interference model extracted from the measurements in the Oulu university hospital is discussed. This paper presents the summary of the simulation results based on the above-mentioned interference models. The simulation results showed that when there is a high interference in a communication channel, the SmartBAN system cannot gain an acceptable frame error level without a physical layer protocol data unit repetition technique and a high signal-to-interference power ratio level (SIR). In a low interference scenario, repetition is also needed when SIR is less than 9 dB.