The deployment of biosensors on the human body for the collection of physiological data constitutes what is called a Wireless Body Area Network (WBAN). Thus, to ensure communications between the different components of WBANs, the IEEE body has established the IEEE 802.15.6 standard as an optimised communication standard for energy-efficient, demanding terminals and sensors operating in or around the human body (but not limited to humans). In this context, several simulation studies have been conducted in the literature to analyse and evaluate the performance of the CSMA/CA access protocol of the IEEE 802.15.6 standard. In addition, efforts have been made to model this protocol in order to better analyse the characteristics of the standard in a more general context. However, these models are partially applicable to WBAN applications with heterogeneous network traffic. This thesis focuses on the modelling of the IEEE 802.15.6 standard in order to provide a means of evaluating and analysing this standard in various conditions and situations. We have tried, through the main contributions made in this thesis, to fill the gaps in the existing work as follows: the first contribution concerns an evaluation of the performance of the IEEE 802.15.6 standard using numerous queue management strategies, in a realistic medical setting (home monitoring of a patient suffering from a heart problem). The second contribution proposes an LLQ (Low Latency Queuing) queue management model as a complement to the CSMA/CA protocol in order to effectively meet the requirements of the standard in terms of Quality of Service (QoS) for certain types of
The third contribution concerns the proposal of an analytical model to study the performance of the CSMA/CA access protocol of the IEEE 802.15.6 standard, in terms of latency and packet delivery rate, under the assumption that WBANs are composed of heterogeneous nodes that generate heterogeneous traffic in terms of priority. The last contribution deals with the issue of security in WBANs. It proposes a security protocol called "Server-Based Secure Key Management for the IEEE 802.15.6 standard" (SBSKM), which allows the standard to address the vulnerability of identity theft by including a trusted server, responsible for the creation, initialization and distribution of encryption keys and their renewal, as well as guaranteeing the identity of the sensors joining the network. Keywords: WBANs, IEEE 802.15.6, renewal and reward processes, priority queues, identity theft attacks, etc.