THROUGHPUT IMPROVEMENT OF IEEE 802.15.4 BASED MEDICAL AD-HOC SENSOR NETWORKS USING CLEAR CHANNEL ASSESSMENT

�The Co-existence of the heterogeneous wireless Networks in the communication subnet is degrading the throughput performance of Medical Ad-hoc Sensor Networks based on IEEE 802.15.4 Wireless Personal Area Networks. The degradation of the throughput performance of these wireless Personal Area networks is mainly due to Interference from the co-existed other similar wireless technologies operating in the 2.4 GHz license free ISM band, the packet collisions due to increased traffic and Congestion at the link or at the node. In this paper, we studied the impact of the interference of IEEE 802.11b/g Wi-Fi on the throughput performance of the Medical Ad-Hoc Sensor Networks, the wireless Personal Area Networks used in healthcare applications. . The Wi-Fi Access points operating in vicinity of the patient’s home causes interference, due to which the Quality of Service of these Medical Adhoc Sensor Networks is severely affected in terms of reduced throughput because of the packet loss. We used Clear Channel Assessment technique to improve the throughput performance. We have conducted experiments on Texas instruments ez430RF2530 motes, which use MSP430 DSP Processor and CC2530 Radio. The experimental results show that the throughput performance is improved by 63 percent by using the Clear Channel Assessment.