This paper presents an implementation of a Low Power Listening-based (LPL) Medium Access Control (MAC) protocol on a platform for Body Area Network (BAN) applications. LPL exploits the transmission of a burst of short packets, called preambles, to synchronize the transmitter and the receiver. In this way, devices are able to spend most of the time in sleeping mode, providing longer lifetime and energy saving. Experiments on the field have been conducted by considering different scenarios and results, in terms of average energy consumed per packet, packet loss rate and average delay, have been investigated. Conclusions regarding the proper parameters setting depending on the application requirements were derived. This work has been performed in the framework of the FP7 Integrated Project, WiserBAN.
We consider an indoor environment with multiple Body Area Networks (BANs) that have to transmit data towards specific sinks, located in fixed positions. Nodes deployed on the same body may cooperate in order to form Virtual Antenna Arrays (VAAs) and transmit data towards one of the available sinks. Sinks are also equipped with multiple antennas, such that a virtual Multiple Input Multiple Output (MIMO) channel is established. Beamforming is used as a cooperation technique on both transmitter and receiver sides. A simple technique, consisting of decimating the number of cooperating nodes in the VAA with the aim of reducing energy consumption as well as interference, is presented. Results show that the proposed technique improves the performance in terms of energy efficiency, and also in terms of block error rate when the system is interference-limited. Performance is evaluated by applying different well-known scheduling strategies.
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