WBAN on NS-3: Novel Implementation with High Performance of IEEE 802.15.6

Wireless Body Area Networks (WBAN) are becoming increasingly important for health care with the development of health consciousness and health detection requirements. A lot of researches have been devoted to the progress of WBAN, for example, the improvement of protocols designed for WBAN, the optimization of parameters and the system performance evaluation. However, the main premise of all the directions above is to provide an efficient and reliable simulation platform, since the existing platforms cannot respond to accord with the reality with high performance. To work this issue out, we construct the WBAN simulation platform on Network Simulation 3 (NS-3) which specifies in good expandability and resources saving and agrees with real networks in many aspects comparing with the other simulators. In this paper, we propose our implementation of WBAN module based on IEEE 802.15.6 standard. Our simulation platform consists of Medium Access Control (MAC) and Physical (PHY) layer of IEEE 802.15.6. Then in order to make the simulation more objective, we design a proper simulation scenario according to the practical application and analyze the simulation results. Finally, we compare the throughput saturation threshold on NS-2 and NS-3 with the analysis results respectively to indicate the superiorities of NS-3 and verify the validity and effectiveness of our WBAN module.