Design of an adaptive medium access control protocol for wireless body area networks with heterogeneous sensors

Abstract

The IEEE 802.15.6 standard emerged as the most suitable standard that fits the special requirements of wireless body area networks. It provides flexibility to designers by recommending the use of several medium access control layer techniques, but does not specify how to combine some or all these recommended techniques to form the most efficient wireless body area network medium access control for a specific scenario. Our goal here is to design a wireless body area network medium access control that provides an optimal combination of these basic techniques that are available in the standard, by taking into consideration the variability and heterogeneity of the sensors. The performance of the proposed techniques is evaluated using some of the standard performance measures such as throughput, delay, and energy consumption.

Lessons Learned about the Design and Active Characterization of On-Body Antennas in the 2.4 GHz Frequency Band

“…Body sensor networks (BSN) are a promising solution to the challenges of personalized healthcare [1][2][3][4][5][6]. These body-centric communications are mainly developed in the 2.4 GHz frequency band using low-power technologies such as Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) [7,8] or IEEE 802.15.4 [9][10][11][12][13] and IEEE 802.15.6 [14][15][16][17][18] standards. A critical element in BSN are the antennas [8,[19][20][21][22] and their design specifications are especially crucial in the case of biomedical applications, in which small ultra-light devices, which suppose no hindrance on a subject's daily life, are required.…”