Wireless communication networking technologies play an important role in supporting ubiquitous networks. Body area network (BAN) is a small-scale wireless communication network, which is considered as a potential technology to provide extremely high quality and convenience for people in a more direct manner. This paper foresees some aspects of BAN. Possible application areas and usage models are overviewed. Some wireless communication technologies are compared for their suitability in supporting BAN. Moreover, a prototype BAN was developed for transmission of three-dimensional accelerating data. Finally, a group of IEEE 802.15.MBAN for standardization on medical BAN is introduced. Some activities of this group are reviewed.

IEEE 802.15 working group established a new study group, body area network (SG-BAN), to develop short range wireless communication technology in and around human body recently. Wearable healthcare is an important category of potential applications of BAN. This paper introduces the IEEE SG-BAN and investigates the performance of 802.15.4b and 802.15.4a for wearable healthcare applications in the heterogeneous networks environment. The object is better understanding of healthcare requirement of BAN and how and where BAN works to be started. In addition to the scalability issue, we found asymmetric clear channel assessment (CCA) abilities among different types of wireless technology. The asymmetric CCA has significant impact on system performance.

Body area networks (BAN) can provide a wide range of applications including medical support, healthcare monitoring, and consumer electronics with increased convenience or comfort. To harmonize with the strong demands from both medical and healthcare societies and ICT industries, a study group referred to as IEEE 802.15.BAN (SG-BAN) was formally set up in November 2006. The objective of SG-BAN is to define project authorization request (PAR) and five criteria (5C) and to lead the group up to the next standardization step. This paper presents a general guidance of SG-BAN. The main up-to-data activities in SG-BAN are introduced. Current status and main issues are overviewed. Some critical and future works are suggested.

The distance between two asynchronous impulse ultra-wideband (UWB) sensors can be obtained from round trip flying time through two-way ranging (TWR) transaction. The clock difference causes error in the flying time measurement account for the order of 10 nanoseconds propagation delay. This paper presents a clock management between UWB sensors in the TWR transaction. The ranging responder estimates the clock of ranging initiator by a delay-locked-loop circuit during reception of ranging frame. When replying the response, the ranging responder locks its clock frequency to the estimated clock of ranging initiator. Consequently the duration of TWR are measured by the same clock. The simulation over the UWB channel models results shows that the relative clock offset can be reduced to less than plusmn1.2 ppm in the worst channel mode.