Impact of MAC Scheduling on Positioning Accuracy for Motion Capture with Ultra Wideband Body Area Networks

International audienceWireless Body Area Networks (WBANs) have recently emer-ged as a solution to enable effective location-aware appli-cations. The rapid mobility of nodes is the most specific problem of this kind of networks and it is not well con-sidered when designing MAC protocols. In this paper, we consider a WBAN using a typical TDMA-based Medium Ac-cess Control (MAC) protocol and an Impulse Radio Ultra Wideband (IR-UWB) physical layer defined by the standard IEEE802.15.6. We investigate the impact of mobility on the Motion Capture applications. The Root Mean Square Er-ror (RMSE) of the estimated positions is analyzed according to different scheduling strategies at MAC layer under a real human mobility model. Our results show that an effective scheduling scheme leads to prioritize the own node position estimation. Finally, we propose to extend the study with a realistic human body channel