Performance Enhancement of Wireless Body Area Network System Combined with Cognitive Radio

In the design and application of wireless body area network (WBAN) system, one main requirement is to improve the performance of the system under low signal to noise ratio scenario and more emphasis is put on the improvement in data link layer and network layer rather than physical layer. In this paper, the idea of applying cognitive radio (CR) technology, one promising technology in recent wireless research, in body area network system will be proposed and demonstration of how CR can enhance the capacity of WBAN system will be showed through simulation. The comparison of performance between whether using CR based on a specific WBAN protocol shows that CR provides large room for the improvement of BAN system.