A cross-layer analysis for providing mobility in wireless body area networks

Abstract

A wireless body area network consists of a network of implanted and wearable sensor nodes to transmit the biological information for wireless healthcare monitoring, elderly care, and many other innovative applications. To support mobility in these resource-constrained networks, suitable modifications have to be performed both at the medium access control and routing layers. Low-duty-cycle MAC protocols that avoid energy problems in the MAC Layer have been taken, and the performance with the RPL routing protocol has been evaluated. RPL is routing protocol proposed by IETF ROLL working group for low-power and lossy networks. In this paper, the performance of XMAC and ContikiMAC is analyzed with respect to RPL parameters and the results show that ContikiMAC consumes 49% less power compared to XMAC.