Wireless Body Area Networks (BAN) are now a well known acronym which encompasses scenarios in which several sensors and actuators are located on the human body to sense different e.g. physiological information at different places on the body and move them wirelessly towards a remote unit which processes, forwards, takes decisions, alerts, records, etc.

Applications making use of BAN span a wide area, for medical to sport through leisure systems which definitely makes the definition of a standard air interface and protocol highly challenging.

Now, since it is expected that such devices and network would have a growing place into the society and more stringent in terms of quality of service, coexistence issues will be critical.

Indeed, the radio resource is known to be scarce. The recent difficulties in the regulation of UWB, the growing interest for opportunistic radios show that any new system have to make an efficient use of the spectrum. This also applies to short range personal and body area network systems which are subject to huge market penetrations.

Contexte