Abstract-In recent years, Wireless Body Area Networks (WBANs) have gained increasing interest in the research community and become an emerging technology, especially in healthcare services. This position paper focuses on the energy optimization issue and the joint routing and MAC protocols in WBANs. We extend upon our previous model on the Energy-Aware Topology Design for WBANs (EAWD), so as to include PHY and MAC-layer WBAN specifications. Indeed, EAWD model considered the topology constraints by minimizing the number of relay nodes, in order to reduce the total energy consumption, as well as the total network installation cost. Yet, EAWD involved quite rough assumptions, omitting overhead considerations, due to MAC routing and physical clear channel assessment problems. Therefore, we first introduce the EAWD model and discuss its limitations. Then, we present our proposal, the Enhanced EAWD (EEAWD), and assess its performance through a synthesis comparison with EAWD and related proposals in the literature.
Time Slotted Channel Hopping (TSCH) is one of the most used MAC mechanisms introduced by the new amendment IEEE 802.15.4e. It combines both slotted access with channel hopping technique to allow multiple communications while exploiting the 16 available channels of 2.4GHz band. The channel hopping mechanism of 802.15.4e considers an interference-free environment and does not specify how to build and manage a schedule for communication purpose. In this paper, we propose a new distributed channel hopping scheme that exploits Latin rectangles to avoid interference and collisions. In essence, the scheduling of links is performed by Latin rectangles where rows are channel offsets and columns are slot offsets. Thus, the frequency of communication is derived using Latin rectangles. Consequently, interference and multi-path fading are mitigated with more reliability and robustness. The efficiency of the proposed scheme has been validated by extensive simulation.
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