Comparative analysis of medium access techniques in wireless body area networks

This paper deals with the performance analysis of three different medium access techniques, namely contention-based, scheduled and polling-based access, utilized in a simple implementation of the wireless body area network (WBAN) IEEE 802.15.6 standard. Their comparison is focused on the trade-offs between polling and scheduled access, in terms of throughput, latency and energy consumption, and reveals the reasons behind their performance differences. These trade-offs should be seriously taken into account by medium access control designers, when working on a WBAN.