Research
A power efficient MAC protocol for wireless body area networks
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* Corresponding author: Kyungsup Kwak kskwak@inha.ac.kr
UWB Wireless Communications Research Center, 6-142, Inha University, Yunghyeon-dong, Nam-gu, Incheon, Korea
EURASIP Journal on Wireless Communications and Networking 2012, 2012:33 doi:10.1186/1687-1499-2012-33
Published: 6 February 2012Abstract
Applications of wearable and implanted wireless sensor devices are hot research area. A specialized field called the body area networks (BAN) has emerged to support this area. Managing and controlling such a network is a challenging task. An efficient media access control (MAC) protocol to handle proper management of media access can considerably improve the performance of such a network. Power consumption and delay are major concerns for MAC protocols in a BAN. Low cost wakeup radio module attached with sensor devices can help reduce power consumption and prolong the network lifetime by reducing idle state power consumption and increasing sleep time of a BAN node. In this article, we propose a new MAC protocol for BAN using out of band (on-demand) wakeup radio through a centralized and coordinated external wakeup mechanism. We have compared our method against some existing MAC protocols. Our method is found to be efficient in terms of power consumption and delay.
