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Practical comparison of ranging in IEEE 802.15.4 and IEEE 802.15.4a medical body sensor networks

Published: 10 September 2010 Publication History

Abstract

In this paper, a practical comparison of the wireless standards IEEE 802.15.4 and IEEE 802.15.4a is described. Particularly the ranging capabilities of both systems are studied, with the aim of enabling a senior health monitoring application to automatically detect with which user sensors are associated. The relevant characteristics of both systems are presented, as well as the difference between received signal strength and time of arrival based ranging methods. Next, a measurement campaign based on a TI 802.15.4/Zigbee chipset and IMEC's 802.15.4a demonstrator is presented. Results show that the received signal strength is too heavily influenced by other parameters to use it as a metric for accurate distance estimation. IEEE 802.15.4a based time of arrival methods are far more accurate. Particularly leading edge detection performs well, with an average error in line-of-sight conditions below 6 cm.

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  • (2017)Theoretical modeling of wireless body area networks ranging errors based on RSSI2017 29th International Conference on Microelectronics (ICM)10.1109/ICM.2017.8268834(1-4)Online publication date: Dec-2017
  • (2014)Research trends in wireless body area networks: From On-Body to Body-to-Body cooperation2014 8th International Symposium on Medical Information and Communication Technology (ISMICT)10.1109/ISMICT.2014.6825240(1-5)Online publication date: Apr-2014

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  1. Practical comparison of ranging in IEEE 802.15.4 and IEEE 802.15.4a medical body sensor networks

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    BodyNets '10: Proceedings of the Fifth International Conference on Body Area Networks
    September 2010
    251 pages
    ISBN:9781450300292
    DOI:10.1145/2221924
    Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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    Published: 10 September 2010

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    Author Tags

    1. IEEE 802.15.4
    2. IEEE 802.15.4a
    3. body area networks
    4. body sensor networks
    5. elderly care
    6. health monitoring
    7. ranging
    8. ultra-wideband

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    • (2017)Theoretical modeling of wireless body area networks ranging errors based on RSSI2017 29th International Conference on Microelectronics (ICM)10.1109/ICM.2017.8268834(1-4)Online publication date: Dec-2017
    • (2014)Research trends in wireless body area networks: From On-Body to Body-to-Body cooperation2014 8th International Symposium on Medical Information and Communication Technology (ISMICT)10.1109/ISMICT.2014.6825240(1-5)Online publication date: Apr-2014

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