A power efficient MAC protocol for wireless body area networks

Abstract

Applications of wearable and implanted wireless sensor devices are hot research area. A specialized field called the body area networks (BAN) has emerged to support this area. Managing and controlling such a network is a challenging task. An efficient media access control (MAC) protocol to handle proper management of media access can considerably improve the performance of such a network. Power consumption and delay are major concerns for MAC protocols in a BAN. Low cost wakeup radio module attached with sensor devices can help reduce power consumption and prolong the network lifetime by reducing idle state power consumption and increasing sleep time of a BAN node. In this article, we propose a new MAC protocol for BAN using out of band (on-demand) wakeup radio through a centralized and coordinated external wakeup mechanism. We have compared our method against some existing MAC protocols. Our method is found to be efficient in terms of power consumption and delay.

Performances Comparison of IEEE 802.15.6 and IEEE 802.15.4 Optimization and Exploitation in Healthcare and Medical Applications

“…The node should sleep for the time specified by the hub after which it wakes up at the right moment to receive the poll packet. However, because of clock synchronization problems, and due to variations in times for which packets are transmitted, the sensor may wake up before or after the stipulated time for sending the poll packet by the hub [12]. All this explains why the polling mechanism is less efficient in terms of energy consumption.…”

“…However, for data rates fewer than 40 kbps, the consumption is lower and doesn't exceed 0.16 j. That is, because the polling process bases on nodes synchronization, if the node wakes up earlier, it will have to stay awake to receive the poll packet from the hub causing unwanted energy loss [12]. If the node wakes up after the poll packet is sent by the hub, the poll packet will be lost and the polling mechanism fails.…”

A Review of Protocol Implementations and Energy Efficient Cross-Layer Design for Wireless Body Area Networks

“…Al Ameen et al [49] presented a WBAN specific TDMA based power efficient MAC using an on-demand wakeup radio mechanism. An additional receiver attached to the sensor node operates independently from the main node radio to reduce idle listening and reduce power consumption at the node level.…”

A novel contention probability dynamism for IEEE 802.15.6 standard

“…In [11], an introduction to an efficient MAC protocol aimed to improve the performance of WBAN networks via providing an optimized power consumption and delay for MAC protocols by using low cost out of hand (on-demand) wakeup radio module to increase the sleeping time of the node. The waking-up process needs to be done through the WBAN coordinator which consumes the system resources.…”