  The recently released IEEE 802.15.6 standard specifies several physical (PHY)
layer and medium access control (MAC) layer protocols for variety of medical
and non-medical applications of Wireless Body Area Networks (WBAN). The most
suitable way for enhancing network performance is to be the choice of different
MAC and PHY parameters based on quality of service (QoS) requirements of
different applications. The impact of different MAC and PHY parameters on the
network performance and the trade-off relationship between the parameters are
essential to overcome the limitations of exiting carrier sense multiple access
with collision avoidance (CSMA/CA) scheme of IEEE 802.15.6 standard. To address
this issue, we develop a Markov chain-based analytical model of IEEE 802.15.6
CSMA/CA for all user priorities (UPs) and apply this general model to different
network scenarios to investigate the effects of the packet arrival rate,
channel condition, payload size, access phase length, access mechanism and
number of nodes on the performance parameters viz. reliability, normalized
throughput, energy consumption and average access delay. Moreover, we conclude
the effectiveness of different access phases, access mechanisms and user
priorities of intra-WBAN.
