This paper gives an overview of the European level standard proposal for smart wireless body area networks (WBAN). Under the mandate of European Telecommunication Standards Institute ETSI, a technical committee TC SmartBAN was formed in 2013. The goal of the TC SmartBAN is to define a standard for low power devices and networks to be used in short range links supporting, e.g., healthcare, wellness and sport relating applications operating around a human body. The main focus areas were in physical and medium access control layers' specifications as well as efficient data presentation format for information delivery. Moreover, experimental measurement campaigns to characterize radio channel occupancy in the specified SmartBAN frequency range have been carried out. The actual work is divided into several, parallel Work Items (WI). Within this paper, a short overview of the ETSI TC SmartBAN work is given. The components of the SmartBAN standard are described in their own dedicated papers.
In this paper we introduce medium access control (MAC) protocol defined by ETSI TC (technical committee) SmartBAN (smart body area network). The key features of the protocol are a two-channel concept with different channels for data and control traffic, and a unique Multi-use Channel Access as one alternative channel access mode. The two-channel concept provides fast channel acquisition and easy Hub to Hub communications. Multi-use Channel Access guarantees for verylow latency emergency messaging for time-critical applications. In addition, Re-use Access mode of the Multi-use Channel Access enables the utilization of the scheduled but unused time slots thus increasing the channel utilization. The protocol is mainly a joint work between Centre for Wireless Communications (CWC) at
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