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

An Analysis of the Requirements for Efficient Protocols in WBAN

Wireless Body Area Networks (WBAN) plays a major role in the advancement of technology, particularly for diagnosising the many life threatening diseases as well as providing real-time health monitoring. The objective of this paper is to study and analyze the problems of protocols in WBAN to provide the requirements related to health care in a medical environment. The protocols need to be energy efficient and reliable as well. To date, several metrics, such as channel utilization and energy efficiencies are defined. This research provides a clear outlook on the types of routing protocols and the problems related to the losses and distribution of data in a medical environment, thus meeting energy efficiency, low delay and reliability

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

ATLAS: A Traffic Load Aware Sensor MAC Design for Collaborative Body Area Sensor Networks

In collaborative body sensor networks, namely wireless body area networks (WBANs), each of the physical sensor applications is used to collaboratively monitor the health status of the human body. The applications of WBANs comprise diverse and dynamic traffic loads such as very low-rate periodic monitoring (i.e., observation) data and high-rate traffic including event-triggered bursts. Therefore, in designing a medium access control (MAC) protocol for WBANs, energy conservation should be the primary concern during low-traffic periods, whereas a balance between satisfying high-throughput demand and efficient energy usage is necessary during high-traffic times. In this paper, we design a traffic load-aware innovative MAC solution for WBANs, called ATLAS. The design exploits the superframe structure of the IEEE 802.15.4 standard, and it adaptively uses the contention access period (CAP), contention free period (CFP) and inactive period (IP) of the superframe based on estimated traffic load, by applying a dynamic “wh” (whenever which is required) approach. Unlike earlier work, the proposed MAC design includes load estimation for network load-status awareness and a multi-hop communication pattern in order to prevent energy loss associated with long range transmission. Finally, ATLAS is evaluated through extensive simulations in ns-2 and the results demonstrate the effectiveness of the protocol

A Very Low Power MAC (VLPM) Protocol for Wireless Body Area Networks

Wireless Body Area Networks (WBANs) consist of a limited number of battery operated nodes that are used to monitor the vital signs of a patient over long periods of time without restricting the patient’s movements. They are an easy and fast way to diagnose the patient’s status and to consult the doctor. Device as well as network lifetime are among the most important factors in a WBAN. Prolonging the lifetime of the WBAN strongly depends on controlling the energy consumption of sensor nodes. To achieve energy efficiency, low duty cycle MAC protocols are used, but for medical applications, especially in the case of pacemakers where data have time-limited relevance, these protocols increase latency which is highly undesirable and leads to system instability. In this paper, we propose a low power MAC protocol (VLPM) based on existing wakeup radio approaches which reduce energy consumption as well as improving the response time of a node. We categorize the traffic into uplink and downlink traffic. The nodes are equipped with both a low power wake-up transmitter and receiver. The low power wake-up receiver monitors the activity on channel all the time with a very low power and keeps the MCU (Micro Controller Unit) along with main radio in sleep mode. When a node [BN or BNC (BAN Coordinator)] wants to communicate with another node, it uses the low-power radio to send a wakeup packet, which will prompt the receiver to power up its primary radio to listen for the message that follows shortly. The wake-up packet contains the desired node’s ID along with some other information to let the targeted node to wake-up and take part in communication and let all other nodes to go to sleep mode quickly. The VLPM protocol is proposed for applications having low traffic conditions. For high traffic rates, optimization is needed. Analytical results show that the proposed protocol outperforms both synchronized and unsynchronized MAC protocols like T-MAC, SCP-MAC, B-MAC and X-MAC in terms of energy consumption and response time

The Wireless Body Area Sensor Networks and Routing Strategies: Nomenclature and Review of Literature

WBASN is an effective solution that has been proposed in terms of improving the solutions and there are varied benefits that have been achieved from the usage of WBASN solutions in communication, healthcare domain. From the review of stats on rising number of wireless devices and solutions that are coming up which is embraced by the people as wearable devices, implants for medical diagnostic solutions, etc. reflect upon the growing demand for effective models. However, the challenge is about effective performance of such solutions with optimal efficiency. Due to certain intrinsic factors like numerous standards that are available, and also due to the necessity for identifying the best solutions that are based on application requirements. Some of the key issues that have to be considered in the process of WBASN are about the impacts that are taking place from the wireless medium, the lifetime of batteries in the WBASN devices and the other significant condition like the coexistence of the systems among varied other wireless networks that are constituted in the proximity. In this study, scores of models that has been proposed pertaining to MAC protocols for WBASN solutions has been reviewed to understand the efficacy of the existing systems, and a scope for process improvement has been explored for conducting in detail research and developing a solution

Distributed Time Division Multiple Access (DTDMA) Medium Access Control Protocol For Wireless Sensor Networks [TK7872.D48 W872 2008 f rb].

Rangkaian sensor tanpa wayar menerima perhatian yang memberangsangkan sejak beberapa tahun yang lalu disebabkan oleh peningkatan permintaan terhadap perisian kadar rendah, murah dan menjimatkan tenaga seperti operasi perkilangan, ketenteraan, kesihatan, pengawasan alam sekitar, sekuriti, operasi penyelamatan dan komunikasi tanpa wayar. Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) received tremendous attention over the last few years due to increasing demand for low data rate, low-cost and low power applications in industries like factory automation, military, health and hospitality,environment monitoring, security, search and rescue, and wireless communications