Performance of simple and Smart PHY/MAC mechanisms for Body Area Networks

Abstract

Measuring the living condition and health status of users using small sensing devices and collecting the data of each user over wireless networks is expected to be a new trend in healthcare. Body Area Network (BAN) is an emerging area of personal data communications that will facilitate the capture of data and its collection. Although the IEEE 802.15.6 standard for wireless body area networks was created for this purpose, it is very complex and is unsuitable for ultra low power sensors. A new BAN specification, under the Technical Committee (TC) on SmartBAN, is now being considered in the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI) targeting ultra low power devices. Some of the technical requirements of the new Smart BAN system includes ultra-low power consumption, coexistence with other wireless systems, a timely access mechanism and optimum control of quality of service (QoS) for emergency signals. A simple and energy efficient MAC/PHY system has been proposed by the authors as part of the ETSI TC Smart BAN specifications.In this paper, we introduce and evaluate our proposed Smart BAN system which is based on two channels, a control channel and a data channel. The control channel is used for announcements from which both nodes and neighboring hubs are able to gather information for use in co-existence algorithms as well as for initial connection setup. Our proposed system uses simple time division multiple access (TDMA) in the data channel so that the power consumption of nodes is kept low. A shared access mechanism has also been proposed to reduce the latency of emergency signals. We evaluate the access delay and power consumption of our system in this paper, and show that the proposed shared access mechanism reduces the latency of emergency signals.

Energy-Efficient and QoS-Aware Link Adaptation With Resource Allocation for Periodical Monitoring Traffic in SmartBANs

“…Contrarily, the ETSI SmartBAN prioritizes simplicity. Comparative analyses [4], [5] demonstrate that ETSI Smart-BAN connection times and energy consumption are lower than those obtained with the IEEE 802.15.6 standard. These promising results have inspired to further investigate the capabilities of this new standard in the present paper.…”

“…D E = 200ms and Dm i = 3s for all sensors, as specified in [23]. Q TOTALi , T Wup , I Rx , I Tx , I Wait , I Wup and I Slp values are detailed in [4]. In order to compare results corresponding to shortest-IBI and optimal-IBI with the proposed eeAlgorithm, only TM6 will be considered to be used throughout this Subsection.…”

Fundamental MAC Performance Evaluation under Multiple IEEE802.15.6ma BAN Co-Existence

“…For 5th generation (5G) wireless communications, non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) is discussed that allows more wireless signals to be subdivided by power in addition to the conventional frequency and time domains for improving communication efficiency. However, because complicated MAC protocol leads to not only the enhancement of communication efficiency but also the increase of energy consumption, consideration of trade-off relationship between the performance and energy consumption is required especially in BANs [5]. Therefore, simplicity of the MAC protocol is desirable for BANs that assumes constant vital measurement for a long period of time.…”

Evolution of Wireless Standards for Health Monitoring

“…Having said that, this standard is not light itself [9] and deficits some important parameters such as very high energy efficiency, Co-existence mechanism in the presence of neighboring Body Area Networks(BANs), latency, packet error correction etc. In addition to that, the implementation of the system is really tough in the presence of numerous functionalities, hence, making the system very complex to implement and evaluate [10]. In this context, the European Telecommunication Standards Institute (ETSI) formed a Technical Committee (TC) name TC smartBAN in 2013.…”