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

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

HEH-BMAC: hybrid polling MAC protocol for WBANs operated by human energy harvesting

This paper introduces human energy harvesting medium access control (MAC) protocol (HEH-BMAC), a hybrid polling MAC suitable for wireless body area networks powered by human energy harvesting. The proposed protocol combines two different medium access methods, namely polling (ID-polling) and probabilistic contention access, to adapt its operation to the different energy and state (active/inactive) changes that the network nodes may experience due to their random nature and the time variation of the energy harvesting sources. HEH-BMAC exploits the packet inter-arrival time and the energy harvesting rate information of each node to implement an efficient access scheme with different priority levels. In addition, our protocol can be applied dynamically in realistic networks, since it is adaptive to the topology changes, allowing the insertion/removal of wireless sensor nodes. Extensive simulations have been conducted in order to evaluate the protocol performance and study the throughput and energy tradeoffs.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

Performance evaluation of wake-up radio based wireless body area network

Abstract. The last decade has been really ambitious in new research and development techniques to reduce energy consumption especially in wireless sensor networks (WSNs). Sensor nodes are usually battery-powered and thus have very limited lifetime. Energy efficiency has been the most important aspect to discuss when talking about wireless body area network (WBAN) in particular, since it is the bottleneck of these networks. Medium access control (MAC) protocols hold the vital position to determine the energy efficiency of a WBAN, which is a key design issue for battery operated sensor nodes. The wake-up radio (WUR) based MAC and physical layer (PHY) have been evaluated in this research work in order to contribute to the energy efficient solutions development. WUR is an on-demand approach in which the node is woken up by the wake-up signal (WUS). A WUS switches a node from sleep mode to wake up mode to start signal transmission and reception. The WUS is transmitted or received by a secondary radio transceiver, which operates on very low power. The energy benefit of using WUR is compared with conventional duty-cycling approach. As the protocol defines the nodes in WUR based network do not waste energy on idle listening and are only awakened when there is a request for communication, therefore, energy consumption is extremely low. The performance of WUR based MAC protocol has been evaluated for both physical layer (PHY) and MAC for transmission of WUS and data. The probabilities of miss detection, false alarm and detection error rates are calculated for PHY and the probabilities of collision and successful data transmission for channel access method Aloha is evaluated. The results are obtained to compute and compare the total energy consumption of WUR based network with duty cycling. The results prove that the WUR based networks have significant potential to improve energy efficiency, in comparison to conventional duty cycling approach especially, in the case of low data-reporting rate applications. The duty cycle approach is better than WUR approach when sufficiently low duty cycle is combined with highly frequent communication between the network nodes