Performance Analysis of Polling Mechanism in WBAN

Medium Access Control (MAC) design is one of the essential pre-requisites for successful implementation of a wireless network, particularly in the application of health monitoring in other words Wireless Body Area Network (WBAN). IEEE S02.15.6 defines different access mechanisms for WBAN including contention based, scheduled/unscheduled and polling mechanisms. In this paper, we focus on the analysis of polling mechanism and the impact on WBAN. We derive an analytical model from examining the mean waiting time, delay and throughput, and present the analytical result for varying transmission rate, nodes and payload size. This elemental analysis provides significant insight into implementing polling mechanism that corresponds to realistic physiological data. Our study also provides an explanation that could be taken into consideration while realizing WBAN.