A Novel WBAN MAC protocol with Improved Energy Consumption and Data Rate

Abstract

Wireless Body Area Networks (WBANs) are introduced as an enablingtechnology in tele-health for patient monitoring. Designing an efficientMedium Access Control (MAC) protocol is the main challenge in WBANsbecause of their various applications and strict requirements such aslow level of energy consumption, low transmission delay, the wide rangeof data rates and prioritizing emergency data. In this paper, we proposea new MAC protocol to provide different requirements of WBANs targetedfor medical applications. The proposed MAC provides an efficientemergency response mechanism by considering the correlation betweenmedical signals. It also reduces the power consumption of nodes byminimizing contention access, reducing the probability of the collisionand using an efficient synchronization algorithm. In addition, theproposed MAC protocol increases the data rate of the nodes by allocatingthe resources according to the condition of the network. Analytical andsimulation results show that the proposed MAC protocol outperforms IEEE802.15.4 MAC protocol in terms of power consumption level as well as theaverage response delay. Also, the comparison results of the proposed MACwith IEEE 802.15.6 MAC protocol show a tradeoff between average responsedelay and medical data rate.