Performance Analysis of IEEE 802.15.6 Contention-based MAC Protocol

IEEE International Conference on Communications (IEEE ICC 2015). 8 to 12, Jun, 2015, IEEE ICC 2015 - Communications QoS, Reliability and Modeling, London, United Kingdom.IEEE 802.15.6 facilitates communication in the vicinity of or even inside a human body to serve heterogeneous medical, consumer electronics, and entertainment applications. This standard operates in beacon and non-beacon communication modes, and each mode employs different protocols, including CSMA/CA, for resource allocation on the channel. The CSMA/CA protocol presented in IEEE 802.15.6 allows quick and prioritized access to the channel by differentiating contention window bounds of nodes with different priorities. This paper provides a simple and accurate analytical model to estimate the throughput, energy consumption, and delay of this protocol for different priority classes, under the assumption of a finite number of nodes in saturated and lossy channel conditions. The accuracy of the proposed model is validated by simulations. The results obtained in this paper can be used to design standard priority parameters for medical and non-medical applications

An Analysis Framework for Inter-User Interference in IEEE 802.15.6 Body Sensor Networks: A Stochastic Geometry Approach

Inter-user interference occurs when multiple body sensor networks (BSNs) are transmitting simultaneously in close proximity to each other. Interference analysis in BSNs is challenging due to the hybrid medium access control (MAC) and the specific channel characteristics of BSNs. This paper presents a stochastic geometry analysis framework for inter-user interference in IEEE 802.15.6 BSNs. An extended Matern point process is proposed to model the complex spatial distribution of the interfering BSNs caused by the hybrid MAC defined in IEEE 802.15.6. We employ stochastic geometry approach to evaluate the performance of BSNs, considering the specific channel characteristics of BSNs in the vicinity of human body. Performance metrics are derived in terms of outage probability and spatial throughput in the presence of inter-user interference. We conduct performance evaluation through extensive simulations and show that the simulation results fit well with the analytic results. Insights are provided on the determination of the interference detection range, the BSN density, and the design of MAC for BSNs

A game theory control scheme in medium access for wireless body area network

Wireless Body Area Network (WBAN) has been considered for applications in medical, healthcare and sports fields. Although there are several protocols for wireless personal area networks, specific features and reliability requirements in WBAN bring new challenges in protocol design. An appropriate control scheme in the MAC layer can make a significant improvement in network performance. Based on traffic priority and prior knowledge this paper proposes a game theoretical framework to smartly control access in contention period and contention free period as defined in IEEE 802.15.6 standard. The coordinator controls access probability of contention period based on users' priority in CSMA/CA and allocates suitable slots with strategies for best payoff based on link states in guaranteed time slots (GTS). The simulation results show the improved performance especially in heavily loaded channel condition when the optimal control mode is applied

Study of MAC Protocols for Mobile Wireless Body Sensor Networks

Wireless Body Area Networks (WBAN) also referred to as a body sensor network (BSN), is a wireless network of wearable computing devices. It has emerged as a key technology to provide real-time health monitoring of a patient and diagnose many life threatening diseases. WBAN operates in close vicinity to, on, or inside a human body and supports a variety of medical and non-medical applications. The design of a medium access control is a challenge due to the characteristics of wireless channel and the need to fulfill both requirements of mobility support and energy efficiency.  This paper presents a comparative study of IEEE 802.15.6, IEEE 804.15.4 and T-MAC in order to analyze the performance of each standard in terms of delay, throughput and energy consumption. Keywords: Biomedical, IEEE 802.15.6; T-MAC, IEEE 802.15.4, mobility, low-power communication, wireless body sensor networks, implantable sensors, healthcare applications, biosensors

Performance Analysis of Priority-Based IEEE 802.15.6 Protocol in Saturated Traffic Conditions

Recent advancement in internet of medical things has enabled deployment of miniaturized, intelligent, and low-power medical devices in, on, or around a human body for unobtrusive and remote health monitoring. The IEEE 802.15.6 standard facilitates such monitoring by enabling low-power and reliable wireless communication between the medical devices. The IEEE 802.15.6 standard employs a carrier sense multiple access with collision avoidance protocol for resource allocation. It utilizes a priority-based backoff procedure by adjusting the contention window bounds of devices according to user requirements. As the performance of this protocol is considerably affected when the number of devices increases, we propose an accurate analytical model to estimate the saturation throughput, mean energy consumption, and mean delay over the number of devices. We assume an error-prone channel with saturated traffic conditions. We determine the optimal performance bounds for a fixed number of devices in different priority classes with different values of bit error ratio. We conclude that high-priority devices obtain quick and reliable access to the error-prone channel compared to low-priority devices. The proposed model is validated through extensive simulations. The performance bounds obtained in our analysis can be used to understand the tradeoffs between different priority levels and network performance.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

TRW-MAC: A thermal-aware receiver-driven wake-up radio enabled duty cycle MAC protocol for multi-hop implantable wireless body area networks in Internet of Things

Implantable Wireless Body Area Network (IWBAN), a network of implantable medical sensors, is one of the emerging network paradigms due to the rapid proliferation of wireless technologies and growing demand of sophisticated healthcare. The wireless sensors in IWBAN is capable of communicating with each other through radio frequency (RF) link. However, recurring wireless communication inside the human body induces heat causing severe thermal damage to the human tissue which, if not controlled, may appear as a threat to human life. Moreover, higher propagation loss inside the human body as well as low-power requirement of the sensor nodes necessitate multi-hop communication for IWBAN. A IWBAN also requires meeting certain Quality of Service demands in terms of energy, delay, reliability etc. These pressing concerns engender the design of TRW-MAC: A thermal-aware receiver-driven wake-up radio enabled duty cycle MAC protocol for multi-hop IWBANs in Internet of Things. TRW-MAC introduces a thermal-aware duty cycle adjustment mechanism to reduce temperature inside the body and adopts wake-up radio (WuR) scheme for attaining higher energy efficiency. The protocol devises a wake-up estimation scheme to facilitate staggered wake-up schedule for multi-hop transmission. A superframe structure is introduced that utilizes both contention-based and contention free medium access operations. The performance of TRW-MAC is evaluated through simulations that exhibit its superior performance in attaining lower thermal-rise as well as satisfying other QoS metrics in terms of energy-efficiency, delay and reliability

Performance evaluation of IEEE 802.15.6 CSMA/CA-based CANet WBAN

International audienceIn the recent few years, Wireless Body Area networks (WBANs) showed what can be done remotely to greatly improve healthcare systems and facilitate the life to elderly. One of the recent ehealth projects is CANet which aims at embedding a WBAN into a cane to monitor elderly/patients. Our main goal in this paper is to evaluate the performances of the emerging standard IEEE 802.15.6 when applied on different sensors from CANet eHealth project. At this end, we defined a small scenario extracted from CANet, and we assigned IEEE 802.15.6 priorities to the selected cane sensors according to their inherent characteristics. We considered further the mandatory RAP period of IEEE 802.15.6 superframe under the beacon period with superframes mode since it supports both normal and urgent traffic. Our results showed that the contention access behavior of this considered model of simulation depends on several constraints (including the nature of the studied application and the traffic types and frequency). This would be necessarily taken into account to get the most advantage of all features offered by WBANs standard IEEE 802.15.6. Keywords—Medium Access Control (MAC), wireless body area networks (WBANs), E-health, CANet project, wireless sensor networks (WSN), IEEE 802.15.6

TraPy-MAC: Traffic Priority Aware Medium Access Control Protocol for Wireless Body Area Network

Recently, Wireless Body Area Network (WBAN) has witnessed significant attentions in research and product development due to the growing number of sensor-based applications in healthcare domain. Design of efficient and effective Medium Access Control (MAC) protocol is one of the fundamental research themes in WBAN. Static on-demand slot allocation to patient data is the main approach adopted in the design of MAC protocol in literature, without considering the type of patient data specifically the level of severity on patient data. This leads to the degradation of the performance of MAC protocols considering effectiveness and traffic adjustability in realistic medical environments. In this context, this paper proposes a Traffic Priority-Aware MAC (TraPy-MAC) protocol for WBAN. It classifies patient data into emergency and non-emergency categories based on the severity of patient data. The threshold value aided classification considers a number of parameters including type of sensor, body placement location, and data transmission time for allocating dedicated slots patient data. Emergency data are not required to carry out contention and slots are allocated by giving the due importance to threshold value of vital sign data. The contention for slots is made efficient in case of non-emergency data considering threshold value in slot allocation. Moreover, the slot allocation to emergency and non-emergency data are performed parallel resulting in performance gain in channel assignment. Two algorithms namely, Detection of Severity on Vital Sign data (DSVS), and ETS Slots allocation based on the Severity on Vital Sign (ETS-SVS) are developed for calculating threshold value and resolving the conflicts of channel assignment, respectively. Simulations are performed in ns2 and results are compared with the state-of-the-art MAC techniques. Analysis of results attests the benefit of TraPy-MAC in comparison with the state-of-the-art MAC in channel assignment in realistic medical environments

Critical data-based incremental cooperative communication for wireless body area network

Wireless Body Area Networks (WBANs) are single-hop network systems, where sensors gather the body’s vital signs and send them directly to master nodes (MNs). The sensors are distributed in or on the body. Therefore, body posture, clothing, muscle movement, body temperature, and climatic conditions generally influence the quality of the wireless link between sensors and the destination. Hence, in some cases, single hop transmission (‘direct transmission’) is not sufficient to deliver the signals to the destination. Therefore, we propose an emergency-based cooperative communication protocol for WBAN, named Critical Data-based Incremental Cooperative Communication (CD-ICC), based on the IEEE 802.15.6 CSMA standard but assuming a lognormal shadowing channel model. In this paper, a complete study of a system model is inspected in the terms of the channel path loss, the successful transmission probability, and the outage probability. Then a mathematical model is derived for the proposed protocol, end-to-end delay, duty cycle, and average power consumption. A new back-off time is proposed within CD-ICC, which ensures the best relays cooperate in a distributed manner. The design objective of the CD-ICC is to reduce the end-to-end delay, the duty cycle, and the average power transmission. The simulation and numerical results presented here show that, under general conditions, CD-ICC can enhance network performance compared to direct transmission mode (DTM) IEEE 802.15.6 CSMA and benchmarking. To this end, we have shown that the power saving when using CD-ICC is 37.5% with respect to DTM IEEE 802.15.6 CSMA and 10% with respect to MI-ICC