An Ultra Low-power and Traffic-adaptive Medium Access Control Protocol for Wireless Body Area Network

Abstract

Wireless Body Area Network (WBAN) consists of low-power, miniaturized, and autonomous wireless sensor nodes that enable physicians to remotely monitor vital signs of patients and provide real-time feedback with medical diagnosis and consultations. It is the most reliable and cheaper way to take care of patients suffering from chronic diseases such as asthma, diabetes and cardiovascular diseases. Some of the most important attributes of WBAN is low-power consumption and delay. This can be achieved by introducing flexible duty cycling techniques on the energy constraint sensor nodes. Stated otherwise, low duty cycle nodes should not receive frequent synchronization and control packets if they have no data to send/receive. In this paper, we introduce a Traffic-adaptive MAC protocol (TaMAC) by taking into account the traffic information of the sensor nodes. The protocol dynamically adjusts the duty cycle of the sensor nodes according to their traffic-patterns, thus solving the idle listening and overhearing problems. The traffic-patterns of all sensor nodes are organized and maintained by the coordinator. The TaMAC protocol is supported by a wakeup radio that is used to accommodate emergency and on-demand events in a reliable manner. The wakeup radio uses a separate control channel along with the data channel and therefore it has considerably low power consumption requirements. Analytical expressions are derived to analyze and compare the performance of the TaMAC protocol with the well-known beacon-enabled IEEE 802.15.4 MAC, WiseMAC, and SMAC protocols. The analytical derivations are further validated by simulation results. It is shown that the TaMAC protocol outperforms all other protocols in terms of power consumption and delay.

A residential maintenance-free long-term activity monitoring system for healthcare applications

“…On a different perspective, related work on wireless body area networks (WBANs) typically focuses on wireless communications and the consumption of the radio, often disregarding the power consumption of other parts of the system (for instance, see [21] and [22]). In cases where energy harvesting technologies are employed, related works have proposed adaptive protocols that deal with the challenge of providing the required quality of service under spatio-temporal uncertainty in the energy input [23][24][25][26].…”

iM-SIMPLE: iMproved stable increased-throughput multi-hop link efficient routing protocol for Wireless Body Area Networks

“…From simulation results, we also conclude that the effect of path loss exponent is more on the per round energy consumption of the network as compared to that of the communication distance. Path loss is also investigated in this work, and in future we are interested to exploit Medium Access Control (MAC) layer for energy efficiency in WBANs like Ullah & Kwak, 2012).…”

Medium Access Control (MAC) for Wireless Body Area Network (WBAN): Superframe structure, multiple access technique, taxonomy, and challenges

“…The Traffic adaptive MAC (TaMAC) protocol [28] is suggested to handle normal data, emergency and ondemand data. The suggested Superframe structure comprises of CCAP and CFP periods.…”

“…In an emergency situation, the sensor transmits an alert signal to the body coordinator and the body coordinator replies with allocation of a channel. The energy consumption is low but sensors wait to transmit data in their predefined time slot which is the drawback of this protocol [28] due to outnumber of states in the state-transaction diagram. Another limitation is that the predefined based slot allocation to normal and emergency data is not acceptable due to the long wait where sensors drop data.…”