Behavior of IEEE 802.15.4 Channel Models on Implant Body Area Network M.A. Huq 1,2,3 , Mohsin Iftikhar 1,2,3 , and Naveen Chilamkurti 1,2,3(&) 1 Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Primeasia University, Dhaka, Bangladesh marifulhuq.huq@gmail.com, miftikhar@csu.edu.au, N.Chilamkurti@latrobe.edu.au 2 School of Computing and Mathematics, Charles Sturt University, Sydney, Australia 3 La Trobe University, Melbourne, Australia Abstract. With recent developments in the wireless networking technologies Wireless Body Area Networks (WBANs) have enabled the scope for building cost-effective and non-invasive health monitoring system. Electromagnetic wave propagation and characterization of the physical layer are important to design a suitable channel model for WBANs. Most of the radios used in WBANs are based on IEEE 802.15.4 compliant chip set. In this paper, we modified channel model of IEEE 802.15.4 in NS-2 to study the performance of channel model CM1 (implant to implant) and channel model CM2 (between an implant device and an on or out-of body device) with different sets of simulation experiments. The simulation results successfully confirmed that the modified IEEE 802.15.4 protocol could be used in WBANs. Keywords: Implant WBANs  Channel model  NS-2 implementation 1 Introduction Wireless communication is now considered as a never-ending growing technology. With the advances in the miniaturization of electronic devices, especially the sizes of the microcontroller, the wireless chip, intelligent biosensors, longer-life battery remote health monitoring has become an important research issue now-a-days. At the end of 2007, the IEEE launched a new task group of IEEE 802.15.6 [1] known as Wireless Body Area Network (WBAN) [1, 2] to provide short range low power and highly reliable wireless communications for use in close proximity to or inside the human body. Depending on whether it operates outside or inside a human body, WBANs can be divided into wearable WBANs and implant WBANs [3]. While wearable WBANs are considered for both medical and non-medical applications, implant WBANs are mainly considered for medical and healthcare applications. In implant WBANs the characteristics of the radio propagation channel are mainly influenced by body tissues, whereas, in wearable WBANs radio signals propagate through air. The human body is a challenging medium for radio wave transmission. It is partially conductive and consists of materials of different dielectric constants, thickness, and characteristic © ICST Institute for Computer Sciences, Social Informatics and Telecommunications Engineering 2017 J.-H. Lee and S. Pack (Eds.): QShine 2016, LNICST 199, pp. 251–257, 2017. DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-60717-7_25