A CSMA/CA Based MAC Layer Solution for Inter-WBAN Interference and Starvation

With the advancement in wireless communication technologies, E-healthcare system has been proposed to deal with the issues such as inefficiency, high cost, and degradations in service quality in traditional health-care systems. Wireless Body Area Network (WBAN) is widely used in E-healthcare system as it provides continuous monitoring on physiological parameters. However, when two or more WBANs overlap with each other, there exists inter-WBAN interference. The inter-WBAN interference may cause transmission failures, which result in packet losses, throughput degradations, and energy wastes for energy limited sensors. This motivates us to develop a distributed CSMA/CA-based MAC protocol for inter-WBAN interference management. There are three challenges, namely, power optimization, protocol response time, and starvation in designing such a protocol. In this thesis, the power optimization challenge is overcome by an innovative WBAN system. To deal with the challenges in protocol response time and starvation, the proposed MAC protocol extends the CSMA/CA protocol with an adaptive transmission probability that uses frozen time as the adjustment criterion and a back-off counter adjustment mechanism that prioritizes the starving nodes. The proposed protocol achieves throughput improvement, starvation mitigation, and energy efficiency for sensors. Simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed MAC protocol for health-care applications in scenarios such as having dinner at a round table or sitting in a hospital waiting room

Dynamic Channel Access Scheme for Interference Mitigation in Relay-assisted Intra-WBANs

This work addresses problems related to interference mitigation in a single wireless body area network (WBAN). In this paper, We propose a distributed \textit{C}ombined carrier sense multiple access with collision avoidance (CSMA/CA) with \textit{F}lexible time division multiple access (\textit{T}DMA) scheme for \textit{I}nterference \textit{M}itigation in relay-assisted intra-WBAN, namely, CFTIM. In CFTIM scheme, non interfering sources (transmitters) use CSMA/CA to communicate with relays. Whilst, high interfering sources and best relays use flexible TDMA to communicate with coordinator (C) through using stable channels. Simulation results of the proposed scheme are compared to other schemes and consequently CFTIM scheme outperforms in all cases. These results prove that the proposed scheme mitigates interference, extends WBAN energy lifetime and improves the throughput. To further reduce the interference level, we analytically show that the outage probability can be effectively reduced to the minimal.Comment: 2015 IEEE International Conference on Protocol Engineering (ICPE) and International Conference on New Technologies of Distributed Systems (NTDS), Paris, France. arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1602.0865

A Review of Wireless Body Area Networks for Medical Applications

Recent advances in Micro-Electro-Mechanical Systems (MEMS) technology, integrated circuits, and wireless communication have allowed the realization of Wireless Body Area Networks (WBANs). WBANs promise unobtrusive ambulatory health monitoring for a long period of time and provide real-time updates of the patient's status to the physician. They are widely used for ubiquitous healthcare, entertainment, and military applications. This paper reviews the key aspects of WBANs for numerous applications. We present a WBAN infrastructure that provides solutions to on-demand, emergency, and normal traffic. We further discuss in-body antenna design and low-power MAC protocol for WBAN. In addition, we briefly outline some of the WBAN applications with examples. Our discussion realizes a need for new power-efficient solutions towards in-body and on-body sensor networks.Comment: 7 pages, 7 figures, and 3 tables. In V3, the manuscript is converted to LaTe