Interference of wireless technologies on BLE based WBANs in hospital scenarios

Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) devices are becoming common in hospital scenarios. This technology is widely employed to collect patients' vital signs, to provide wireless connectivity to medical equipment, and to enable communications between devices carried by hospital personnel, patients and visitors. This paper presents a mathematical model to evaluate the impact of the interferences, from different wireless technologies, on the performance of a BLE-based body area networks operating over the 1 Mbit/s physical layer (PHY). The interfering technologies addressed are ZigBee (802.15.4), Wi-Fi (802.11), and the newly introduced BLE version 5.0 (coded PHY). The results for the latter are supported by real-life measurements, which are reported in this paper, thus giving some insight into the practical performance of this new technology. The presented numerical results provide guidance on how to manage these various technologies to minimize the packet error rate (PER) of the communications emanating from the on-body BLE enabled devices.