An Empirical Study of the Performance of IEEE 802.15.4e TSCH for Wireless Body Area Networks

Wireless Body Area Networks (WBANs) have made their way into many smart and ubiquitous healthcare and wellness applications. A low-power, efficient, and reliable communication protocol is of paramount importance for the success of WBANs in satisfying the requirements of the health applications. The IEEE 802.15.4 standard is always one of the main options due to its efficiency and low-complexity. However, it suffers from the impact of other wireless technologies using the same frequency band such as WiFi and Bluetooth. Time Slotted Channel Hoping (TSCH) is an operational mode of the IEEE 802.15.4e standard, which is originally developed for reliable industrial wireless networks. TSCH has Time Division Multiple Access (TDMA) and frequency hopping features, which increase the network robustness against effects such as noise, interference, and multi-path fading. This paper proposes to exploit TSCH for communications in WBANs, and studies its performance. The features of TSCH like power efficiency, TDMA-based operation, and heterogeneity support fit very well with the requirements of many health monitoring applications. The performance of the TSCH standard for WBAN communications is investigated through real-world experiments in various conditions. The results show that TSCH outperforms the basic IEEE 802.15.4 standard in terms of communication reliability against interferences from coexisting wireless devices.