No abstract

The IEEE 802.15.6 is a new standard on wireless body area network (WBAN) for short-range, extremely low power wireless communication with high data rates in the vicinity of, or inside, a human body. The standard defines two contention-based channel access schemes: slotted ALOHA and carrier sense multiple access with collision avoidance (CSMA/CA) using an alternative binary exponential backoff procedure. The standard supports quality of service (QoS) differentiation through user priorities and access phases. In this study, we develop an analytical model for the estimation of performance metrics such as energy consumption, normalized throughput, and mean frame service time, employing a Markov chain model under nonsaturated heterogeneous traffic scenarios including different access phases specified in the standard for different user priorities and access methods. We conclude that the deployment of exclusive access phase (EAP) is not necessary in a typical WBAN using CSMA/CA because it degrades the overall system throughput, consumes more energy per packet, and results in higher delay for nonemergency nodes.

Wireless Body Area Networks (WBANs) designed for medical, sports, and entertainment applications, have drawn the attention of academia and industry alike. A WBAN is a special purpose network, designed to operate autonomously to connect various medical sensors and appliances, located inside and/or outside of a human body. This network enables physicians to remotely monitor vital signs of patients and provide real time feedback for medical diagnosis and consultations. The WBAN system can offer two significant advantages: patient mobility due to their use of portable monitoring devices and a location independent monitoring facility. With its appealing dimensions, it brings about a new set of challenges, which we do not normally consider in such small sensor networks. It requires a scalable network in terms of heterogeneous data traffic, low power consumption of sensor nodes, integration in and around the body networking and coexistence. This work presents a medium access control protocol for WBAN which tries to overcome the aforementioned challenges. We consider the use of multiple beam adaptive arrays (MBAA) at BAN Coordinator (BAN_C) node. When used as a BAN_C, an MBAA can successfully receive two or more overlapping packets at the same time. Each beam captures a different packet by automatically pointing its pattern toward one packet while annulling other contending packets. This paper describes how an MBAA can be integrated into a single hope star topology as a BAN_C. Simulation results show the performance of our proposed protocol.

Although several Directional Medium Access Control (DMAC) protocols have been designed for use with homogeneous networks, it can take a substantial amount of time to change sensor nodes that are equipped with an omnidirectional antenna for sensor nodes with a directional antenna. Thus, we require a novel MAC protocol for use with an intermediate wireless network that consists of heterogeneous sensor nodes equipped with either an omnidirectional antenna or a directional antenna. The MAC protocols that have been designed for use in homogeneous networks are not suitable for use in a hybrid network due to deaf, hidden, and exposed nodes. Therefore, we propose a MAC protocol that exploits the characteristics of a directional antenna and can also work efficiently with omnidirectional nodes in a hybrid network. In order to address the deaf, hidden, and exposed node problems, we define RTS/CTS for the neighbor (RTSN/CTSN) and Neighbor Information (NIP) packets. The performance of the proposed MAC protocol is evaluated through a numerical analysis using a Markov model. In addition, the analytical results of the MAC protocol are verified through an OPNET simulation.

SUMMARY In ad hoc networks, directional antennas offer many benefits compared with classical omnidirectional antennas. Those include significant increases in spatial reuse, coverage range, and subsequently network capacity as a whole. Most of the proposed directional medium access control methods assume that all the nodes in the network have homogeneous antenna types. However, it is quite unusual that a sudden change will occur, and every laptop, palmtop, computer, and other similar device will be turned into a directional antenna holding device. There will always be a possibility of heterogeneous antenna used in the deployed nodes of the network. In this paper, we have proposed a medium access control protocol that deals with the new challenges introduced into heterogeneous networks in the form of deaf and hidden node problems. Using Optimized Network Engineering Tools 16.0, we have simulated three ad hoc network scenarios. These scenarios have different ratios of omnidirectional and directional nodes. We evaluated the performance of these scenarios by varying the ratio. We found that when we increase the directional nodes in the network, the performance increases. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.