Abstract
The newly emerging wireless body area networks (WBANs) are intended to support both medical applications and consumer electronic (CE) applications. These two types of applications present diverse service requirements. To satisfy both medical and CE applications with a uniform medium access control (MAC) protocol becomes a new challenge for the WBAN. Addressing this problem, a priority-guaranteed MAC protocol is proposed in this paper. In this protocol, data channels are separated from control channels to support collision-free high data rate communication for CE applications. Priority-specific control channels are adopted to provide priority guarantee to life-critical medical applications. Traffic-specific data channels are deployed to improve resource efficiency and latency performance. Moreover, in order to further minimize energy consumption and access latency, an asynchronous wakeup trigger mode is proposed as an enhancement to the priority traffic. Monte Carlo simulations are carried out for performance evaluation. As compared with IEEE 802.15.4 MAC and its improved versions, the priority-guaranteed MAC demonstrates significant improvements on throughput and energy efficiency with a tolerable penalty on latency performance of bursty traffic in CE applications. Therefore, the customized priority-guaranteed MAC satisfies the service requirements of WBAN by making tradeoff among the performances of different applications.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
IEEE BAN Task Group (2009) http://www.ieee802.org/15/pub/TG6.html. Accessed 14 May 2009
Zhang Y, Dolmans G (2009) A new priority-guaranteed MAC protocol for emerging body area networks. Fifth international conference on wireless and mobile communications, ICWMC 2009, pp 140–145, Cannes/La Bocca, France, Aug 23–29, 2009
Zhen B, Li H-B, Kohno R (2007) IEEE body area networks for medical applications. In: Proc. of ISMICT’07, Oulu, Finland
Patel S, Lorincz K, Hughes R, Huggins N, Growdon J, Standaert D, Akay M, Dy J, Welsh M, Bonato P (2009) Monitoring motor fluctuations in patients with Parkinson’s disease using wearable sensors. IEEE Trans Inf Technol Biomed 13(6):864–873
Vogel S, Hulsbusch M, Hennig T, Blazek V, Leonhardt S (2009) IN-EAR vital signs monitoring using a novel micro-optic reflective sensor. IEEE Trans Inf Technol Biomed 13(6):882–889
IEEE P802.15 (2008) https://mentor.ieee.org/802.15/file/08/15-08-0407-06-0006-tg6-applications-summary.doc
Abramson N, Kuo F (1973) “The ALOHA system” computer networks. Prentice-Hall, Englewood Cliffs
Tobagi F, Kleinrock L (1977) Packet switching in radio channels: part IV—stability considerations and dynamic control in carrier sense multiple access. IEEE Trans Commun 25(10):1103–1119
Ye W, Heidemann J, Estrin D (2002) An energy-efficient MAC protocol for wireless sensor networks. Proceeding of the IEEE Infocom, New York, USA, pp 1567–1576
van Dam T, Langendoen K (2003) An adaptive energy-efficient MAC protocol for wireless sensor networks. Sensys03, Los Angeles, USA, pp 171–180
IEEE 802.15.4 (2006) Wireless medium access control (MAC) and physical layer (PHY). Specifications for low-rate wireless personal area networks (LR-WPANS). Standard, IEEE
Marinkovi SJ, Popovici EM, Spagnol C, Faul S, Marnane WP (2009) Energy-efficient low duty cycle MAC protocol for wireless body area networks. IEEE Trans Inf Technol Biomed 13(6):915–925
Fang G, Dutkiewicz E (2009) BodyMAC: energy efficient TDMA-based MAC protocol for wireless body area networks. 9th international symposium on communications and information technology. ISCIT 2009, Incheon, Korea, pp 1455–1459
Omeni O, Wong A, Burdett AJ, Toumazou C (2008) Energy efficient medium access protocol for wireless medical body area sensor networks. IEEE Trans Biomed Circuits Syst 2(4):251–259
Kwon H, Lee S (2009) Energy-efficient multi-hop transmission in body area networks. IEEE PIMRC, Tokyo, pp 2141–2146
Li C, Wang L, Li J, Zhen B, Li H, Kohno R (2009) Scalable and robust medium access control protocol in wireless body area networks. IEEE PIMRC, Tokyo, pp 2127–2131
Ullah S, Khan P, Kwak KS (2009) On the development of low-power MAC protocol for WBANs. IMECS 2009, Hong Kong, China, pp 310–314
Lee W, Rhee SH, Kim Y, Lee H (2009) .An efficient multi-channel management protocol for wireless body area networks. International conference on information networking 2009, ICOIN 2009, Chiang Mai, Thailand, Jan 21–24
Bing B (2000) Stabilization of the randomized slotted ALOHA protocol without the use of channel feedback information. IEEE Commun Lett 4(8):249–251
Cooper W, Zeidler JR, McLaughlin S (2002) Performance analysis of slotted random access channels for W-CDMA systems in Nakagami fading channels. IEEE Trans Veh Technol 51(3):411–424
Koskinen H, Virtamo J (2005) Probability of successful transmission in a random slotted-Aloha wireless multihop network employing constant transmission power. Proceedings of the 8th ACM international symposium on modeling, analysis and simulation of wireless and mobile systems, pp 191–199
Pletcher N, Gambini S, Rabaey J (2007) A 65uW, 1.9 GHz RF to digital baseband wakeup receiver for wireless sensor nodes. Custom integrated circuits conference (CICC), Sep 16–19, San Jose, CA
Pletcher N, Gambini S, Rabaey JM (2008) A 2 GHz 52 μW Wake-up receiver with −72 dBm sensitivity using uncertain-IF architecture. Conference proceedings, IEEE international solid-state circuits conference, San Francisco, CA, pp 525–526
Zhang Y, Huang L, Dolmans G, de Groot H (2009) An analytical model for energy efficiency analysis of different wakeup radio schemes. IEEE international symposium on personal, indoor and mobile radio communications, PIMRC’09, Tokyo, Japan, pp 1148–1152, Sep 13–16
Ndih EDN, Khaled N, De Micheli G (2009) An analytical model for the contention access period of the slotted IEEE 802.15.4 with service differentiation. IEEE international conference on communications, 2009, ICC’09, Dresden, Germany, Jun 14–18
Koubaa A, Alves M, Nefzi B, Song YQ (2006) Improving the IEEE 802.15.4 slotted CSMA/CA MAC for time-critical events in wireless sensor networks. Workshop of real time networks RTN 2006
Zhang Y, Shu F (2009) Packet size optimization for goodput and energy efficiency enhancement in slotted IEEE 802.15.4 networks. IEEE wireless communications and networking conference (WCNC) 2009, Budapest, Hungary, Apr 5–8
Nordic Semiconductor ASA (2007) nRF24L01 Single chip 2.4 GHz transceiver product specification. http://www.nordicsemi.com/index.cfm?obj=product&act=display&pro=89#
IEEE 802.15.3 (2003) Wireless medium access control (MAC) and physical layer (PHY). Specifications for high rate wireless personal area networks (WPANs). Standard, IEEE
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Zhang, Y., Dolmans, G. Priority-guaranteed MAC protocol for emerging wireless body area networks. Ann. Telecommun. 66, 229–241 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12243-010-0232-9
Received:
Accepted:
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12243-010-0232-9