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Traffic-Aware Medium Access Control Protocol for Wireless Body Area Networks

Authors:
Sabin Bhandari
Kishor Singh
Sangman Moh

Keywords: Wireless body area network; medium access control; energy efficiency; quality of service; traffic priority; IEEE 802.15.4.

Abstract:
Wireless body area networks (WBANs) can significantly improve healthcare, diagnostic monitoring, and other medical services. But, existing standards, such as IEEE 802.11 and IEEE 802.15.4 cannot fulfill all the requirements of WBANs. And, numerous medium access control (MAC) protocols have been studied, most of which are derived from the IEEE 802.15.4 superframe structure with some improvements. Nevertheless, the MAC protocols do support required quality of service (QoS) for various forms of traffic coexisting in a WBAN. This paper proposes a traffic-aware MAC (TA-MAC) protocol for WBANs that allocates time slots dynamically based on traffic priority. The performance study shows that the proposed TA-MAC outperforms IEEE 802.15.4 MAC and the conventional priority-based MAC in terms of throughput and energy efficiency.

Pages: 30 to 35

Copyright: Copyright (c) IARIA, 2017

Publication date: July 23, 2017

Published in: conference

ISSN: 2308-443X

ISBN: 978-1-61208-574-6

Location: Nice, France

Dates: from July 23, 2017 to July 27, 2017