Performance of wireless body area networks for health: ETSI SmartBAN or Bluetooth?

This paper deals with a comparative analysis of the performances of two different communications standards for wireless body area networks (WBAN): ETSI SmartBAN and Bluetooth low energy (BLE). The performance comparison is carried out in additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) channel as well as in multipath fading channel. Aggregate interference is also taken into account to show which technology tolerates interference better. Both SmartBAN and BLE are possible wireless solutions to implement services like delivering individual's health-related data. The results show that the SmartBAN can outperform BLE in both AWGN and fading channel, in particular, when interference is present, since SmartBAN can take advantage of BCH and repetition features.