Skip to main content

Advertisement

Springer Nature Link
Log in

MC-MAC: a multi-channel based MAC scheme for interference mitigation in WBANs

  • Published:
Wireless Networks Aims and scope Submit manuscript

Abstract

Wireless body area networks (WBANs) support the inter-operability of biomedical sensors and medical institutions with convenience and high-efficiency, which makes it an appropriate solution for the pervasive healthcare. Typically, WBANs comprise in-body or around-body sensor nodes for collecting data of physiological feature. Therefore, the efficient medium access control (MAC) protocol is a crucial paramount to coordinate these devices and forward data to the medical center in an efficient and reliable way. However, the extensive use of wireless channel and coexistence of WBANs may result in inevitable interference which will cause performance degradation. Besides, contention-based access in single channel in WBANs is less efficient for dense medical traffic on account of large packet delay, energy consumption and low priority starvation. To address these issues above, we propose a multi-channel MAC (MC-MAC) scheme to obtain better network performance. Considering the characteristic and emergency degree of medical traffic, we introduce a novel channel mapping and selection mechanism, cooperating with conflict avoidance strategy, to organize nodes to access available channels without collisions. In addition, we have evaluated the performance of MC-MAC and the standard IEEE 802.15.6 via simulation and hardware test. The test is conducted by hardware platform based on prototype system of WBANs. Both of the analysis and simulation results show that MC-MAC outperforms the IEEE 802.15.6 in terms of packet delay, throughput, packet error rate and frame error rate.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this article

Log in via an institution

Subscribe and save

Springer+ Basic
$34.99 /Month
  • Get 10 units per month
  • Download Article/Chapter or eBook
  • 1 Unit = 1 Article or 1 Chapter
  • Cancel anytime
Subscribe now

Buy Now

Price excludes VAT (USA)
Tax calculation will be finalised during checkout.

Instant access to the full article PDF.

Institutional subscriptions

Fig. 1
Fig. 2
Fig. 3
Fig. 4
Fig. 5
Fig. 6
Fig. 7
Fig. 8
Fig. 9
Fig. 10
Fig. 11

Similar content being viewed by others

References

  1. Cao, J., & Liu, X. (2016). Requirements, challenges, and summary of hardware and software design for a WSN-Based SHM system. In Wireless sensor networks for structural health monitoring (pp. 7–11). Springer International Publishing.

  2. Alemdar, H., & Ersoy, C. (2010). Wireless sensor networks for healthcare: A survey. Computer Networks, 54(15), 2688–2710.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  3. Yang, G. Z., & Yacoub, M. (2006). Body sensor networks. Dordrecht: Springer.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  4. Fortino, G., Di Fatta, G., Pathan, M., & Vasilakos, A. V. (2014). Cloud-assisted body area networks: State-of-the-art and future challenges. Wireless Networks, 20(7), 1925–1938.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  5. Zhang, Z., Wang, H., Vasilakos, A. V., & Fang, H. (2012). ECG-cryptography and authentication in body area networks. IEEE Transactions on Information Technology in Biomedicine, 16(6), 1070–1078.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  6. Yuce, M. R., Ng, P. C., & Khan, J. Y. (2008). Monitoring of physiological parameters from multiple patients using wireless sensor network. Journal of Medical Systems, 32(5), 433–441.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  7. Boquete, L., Ascariz, J. M. R., Cantos, J., Barea, R., Miguel, J. M., Ortega, S., et al. (2012). A portable wireless biometric multi-channel system. Measurement, 45(6), 1587–1598.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  8. IEEE Standards Association. (2012). IEEE standard for local and metropolitan area networks-part 15.6: Wireless body area networks. IEEE Standard for Information Technology, IEEE, 802(6), 1–271.

    Google Scholar 

  9. Kim, S. H., Kim, D. W., & Suh, Y. J. (2013). A survey and comparison of multichannel protocols for performance anomaly mitigation in IEEE 802.11 wireless networks. International Journal of Communication Systems, 26(10), 1288–1307.

    Google Scholar 

  10. Khan, J. Y., Yuce, M. R., Bulger, G., & Harding, B. (2012). Wireless body area network (WBAN) design techniques and performance evaluation. Journal of Medical Systems, 36(3), 1441–1457.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  11. Rashwand, S., & Mišić, J. (2012). Effects of access phases lengths on performance of IEEE 802.15. 6 CSMA/CA. Computer Networks, 56(12), 2832–2846.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  12. Zhou, G., Huang, C., Yan, T., He, T., Stankovic, J. A., & Abdelzaher, T. F. (2006). MMSN: Multi-frequency media access control for wireless sensor networks. In 25th IEEE International Conference on Computer Communications.

  13. Istepanian, R., Laxminarayan, S., & Pattichis, C. S. (2006). M-health. Springer Science + Business Media, Incorporated.

  14. Zhou, J., Cao, Z., Dong, X., Xiong, N., & Vasilakos, A. V. (2015). 4S: A secure and privacy-preserving key management scheme for cloud-assisted wireless body area network in m-healthcare social networks. Information Sciences, 314, 255–276.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  15. He, D., Chen, C., Chan, S., Bu, J., & Vasilakos, A. V. (2012). ReTrust: Attack-resistant and lightweight trust management for medical sensor networks. IEEE Transactions on Information Technology in Biomedicine, 16(4), 623–632.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  16. Cook, D. J., Augusto, J. C., & Jakkula, V. R. (2009). Ambient intelligence: Technologies, applications, and opportunities. Pervasive and Mobile Computing, 5(4), 277–298.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  17. Alrajeh, N., Biglieri, E., Bounabat, B., & Lozano, A. (2011). A smartphone-based healthcare monitoring system-PHY challenges and behavioral aspects. In Wireless mobile communication and healthcare (MobiHealth) (pp. 127–134). Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer.

  18. Jo, M., Han, L., Tan, N. D., & In, H. P. (2015). A survey: Energy exhausting attacks in MAC protocols in WBANs. Telecommunication Systems, 58(2), 153–164.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  19. Chen, M., Gonzalez, S., Vasilakos, A., Cao, H., & Leung, V. C. (2011). Body area networks: A survey. Mobile Networks and Applications, 16(2), 171–193.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  20. Chen, G. T., Chen, W. T., & Shen, S. H. (2014, June). 2L-MAC: A MAC protocol with two-layer interference mitigation in wireless body area networks for medical applications. In 2014 IEEE international conference on communications (ICC) (pp. 3523–3528). IEEE.

  21. Han, C., Dianati, M., Tafazolli, R., Liu, X., & Shen, X. (2012). A novel distributed asynchronous multichannel MAC scheme for large-scale vehicular ad hoc networks. IEEE Transactions on Vehicular Technology, 61(7), 3125–3138.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  22. Almotairi, K. H., & Shen, X. S. (2015). A distributed multi-channel MAC protocol for ad hoc wireless networks. IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing, 14(1), 1–13.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  23. Bahl, P., Chandra, R., & Dunagan, J. (2004, September). SSCH: Slotted seeded channel hopping for capacity improvement in IEEE 802.11 ad-hoc wireless networks. In 10th annual international conference on mobile computing and networking (MOBICOM 2004) (pp. 216–230). ACM.

  24. Huang, W., & Quek, T. Q. (2015, June). Adaptive CSMA/CA MAC protocol to reduce inter-WBAN interference for wireless body area networks. In 2015 IEEE 12th international conference on wearable and implantable body sensor networks (BSN) (pp. 1–6). IEEE.

  25. Kim, B., Cho, J., Kim, D. Y., & Lee, B. (2016, January). ACESS: Adaptive channel estimation and selection scheme for coexistence mitigation in WBANs. In 10th international conference on ubiquitous information management and communication (IMCOM 2016) (p. 96). ACM.

  26. Cho, K., Jin, Z., & Cho, J. (2014, January). Design and implementation of a single radio multi-channel MAC protocol on IEEE 802.15.4 for WBAN. In 8th international conference on ubiquitous information management and communication (IMCOM) (p. 15). ACM.

  27. Kirbas, I., Karahan, A., Sevin, A., & Bayilmis, C. (2013). isMAC: An adaptive and energy-efficient MAC protocol based on multi-channel communication for wireless body area networks. TIIS, 7(8), 1805–1824.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  28. Lee, W., Rhee, S. H., Kim, Y., & Lee, H. (2009, January). An efficient multi-channel management protocol for wireless body area networks. In International conference on information networking (ICOIN 2009) (pp. 1–5). IEEE.

  29. Movassaghi, S., Abolhasan, M., & Smith, D. (2014, June). Smart spectrum allocation for interference mitigation in wireless body area networks. In 2014 IEEE international conference on communications (ICC) (pp. 5688–5693). IEEE.

  30. Wu, Y., Stankovic, J. A., He, T., & Lin, S. (2008, April). Realistic and efficient multi-channel communications in wireless sensor networks. In 27th Conference on computer communications (INFOCOM 2008) (pp. 1867–1875). IEEE.

  31. Alrajeh, N. A., Khan, S., Campbell, C. E., & Shams, B. (2013). Multi-channel framework for body area network in health monitoring. Applied Mathematics Information Sciences, 7(5), 1743.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  32. Khan, J. Y., & Yuce, M. R. (2010). Wireless body area network (WBAN) for medical applications. In New developments in biomedical engineering (pp. 591–628). INTECH.

  33. Ullah, S., Chen, M., & Kwak, K. S. (2012). Throughput and delay analysis of IEEE 802.15. 6-based CSMA/CA protocol. Journal of Medical Systems, 36(6), 3875–3891.

    Article  Google Scholar 

Download references

Acknowledgments

This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China under Grant Nos. 61271176, 61401334 and 61571350, the National Science and Technology Major Project under Grant No. 2013ZX03005007-003, the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities (BDY021403, JB140113), and the 111 Project (B08038).

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. State Key Laboratory of Integrated Services Networks, Xidian University, Xi’an, 710071, Shaanxi, China

    Changle Li, Beibei Zhang & Xiaoming Yuan

  2. Department of Computer and Software Technology, University of Swat, Saidu Sharif, Pakistan

    Sana Ullah

  3. Department of Computer Science, Electrical and Space Engineering, Luleå University of Technology, SE-931 87, Skellefteå, Sweden

    Athanasios V. Vasilakos

Authors
  1. Changle Li
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author inPubMed Google Scholar

  2. Beibei Zhang
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author inPubMed Google Scholar

  3. Xiaoming Yuan
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author inPubMed Google Scholar

  4. Sana Ullah
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author inPubMed Google Scholar

  5. Athanasios V. Vasilakos
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author inPubMed Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Changle Li.

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Check for updates. Verify currency and authenticity via CrossMark

Cite this article

Li, C., Zhang, B., Yuan, X. et al. MC-MAC: a multi-channel based MAC scheme for interference mitigation in WBANs. Wireless Netw 24, 719–733 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11276-016-1366-0

Download citation

  • Published:

  • Issue Date:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11276-016-1366-0

Keywords

Mathematics Subject Classification