A Study of Medium Access Control Protocols for Wireless Body Area Networks

The seamless integration of low-power, miniaturised, invasive/non-invasive lightweight sensor nodes have contributed to the development of a proactive and unobtrusive Wireless Body Area Network (WBAN). A WBAN provides long-term health monitoring of a patient without any constraint on his/her normal dailylife activities. This monitoring requires low-power operation of invasive/non-invasive sensor nodes. In other words, a power-efficient Medium Access Control (MAC) protocol is required to satisfy the stringent WBAN requirements including low-power consumption. In this paper, we first outline the WBAN requirements that are important for the design of a low-power MAC protocol. Then we study low-power MAC protocols proposed/investigated for WBAN with emphasis on their strengths and weaknesses. We also review different power-efficient mechanisms for WBAN. In addition, useful suggestions are given to help the MAC designers to develop a low-power MAC protocol that will satisfy the stringent WBAN requirements.Comment: 13 pages, 8 figures, 7 table

Simulation Analysis of Medium Access Techniques

This paper presents comparison of Access Techniques used in Medium Access Control (MAC) protocol for Wireless Body Area Networks (WBANs). Comparison is performed between Time Division Multiple Access (TDMA), Frequency Division Multiple Access (FDMA), Carrier Sense Multiple Access with Collision Avoidance (CSMA/CA), Pure ALOHA and Slotted ALOHA (S-ALOHA). Performance metrics used for comparison are throughput (T), delay (D) and offered load (G). The main goal for comparison is to show which technique gives highest Throughput and lowest Delay with increase in Load. Energy efficiency is major issue in WBAN that is why there is need to know which technique performs best for energy conservation and also gives minimum delay.Comment: NGWMN with 7th IEEE International Conference on Broadband and Wireless Computing, Com- munication and Applications (BWCCA 2012), Victoria, Canada, 201

A Scalable Hybrid MAC Protocol for Massive M2M Networks

In Machine to Machine (M2M) networks, a robust Medium Access Control (MAC) protocol is crucial to enable numerous machine-type devices to concurrently access the channel. Most literatures focus on developing simplex (reservation or contention based)MAC protocols which cannot provide a scalable solution for M2M networks with large number of devices. In this paper, a frame-based Hybrid MAC scheme, which consists of a contention period and a transmission period, is proposed for M2M networks. In the proposed scheme, the devices firstly contend the transmission opportunities during the contention period, only the successful devices will be assigned a time slot for transmission during the transmission period. To balance the tradeoff between the contention and transmission period in each frame, an optimization problem is formulated to maximize the system throughput by finding the optimal contending probability during contention period and optimal number of devices that can transmit during transmission period. A practical hybrid MAC protocol is designed to implement the proposed scheme. The analytical and simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed Hybrid MAC protocol