An Overview of IEEE 802.15.6 Standard

Wireless Body Area Networks (WBAN) has emerged as a key technology to provide real-time health monitoring of a patient and diagnose many life threatening diseases. WBAN operates in close vicinity to, on, or inside a human body and supports a variety of medical and non-medical applications. IEEE 802 has established a Task Group called IEEE 802.15.6 for the standardization of WBAN. The purpose of the group is to establish a communication standard optimized for low-power in-body/on-body nodes to serve a variety of medical and non-medical applications. This paper explains the most important features of the new IEEE 802.15.6 standard. The standard defines a Medium Access Control (MAC) layer supporting several Physical (PHY) layers. We briefly overview the PHY and MAC layers specifications together with the bandwidth efficiency of IEEE 802.15.6 standard. We also discuss the security paradigm of the standard.