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

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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.

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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).

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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

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  1. Changle Li
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  2. Beibei Zhang
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  3. Xiaoming Yuan
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  5. Athanasios V. Vasilakos
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Correspondence to Changle Li.

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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

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

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