BANMAC: An Opportunistic MAC Protocol for Reliable Communications in Body Area Networks

We consider reliable communications in Body Area Networks (BAN), where a set of nodes placed on human body are connected using wireless links. In order to keep the Specific Absorption Rate (SAR) as low as possible for health safety reasons, these networks operate in low transmit power regime, which...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:2012 IEEE 8th International Conference on Distributed Computing in Sensor Systems pp. 166 - 175
Main Authors: Prabh, K. Shashi, Royo, Fernando, Tennina, Stefano, Olivares, Teresa
Format: Conference Proceeding
Language:English
Published: IEEE 01.05.2012
Subjects:
Body Area Networks
IEEE 802.15 Standards
IEEE 802.15.4
MAC Protocol
Media Access Protocol
Payloads
Peer to peer computing
Prediction algorithms
Schedules
ISBN:1467316938, 9781467316934
ISSN:2325-2936
Online Access:Get full text
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Summary:We consider reliable communications in Body Area Networks (BAN), where a set of nodes placed on human body are connected using wireless links. In order to keep the Specific Absorption Rate (SAR) as low as possible for health safety reasons, these networks operate in low transmit power regime, which however, is known to be error prone. It has been observed that the fluctuations of the Received Signal Strength (RSS) at the nodes of a BAN on a moving person show certain regularities and that the magnitude of these fluctuations are significant (5 -- 20 dB). In this paper, we present BANMAC, a MAC protocol that monitors and predicts the channel fluctuations and schedules transmissions opportunistically when the RSS is likely to be higher. The MAC protocol is capable of providing differentiated service and resolves co-channel interference in the event of multiple co-located BANs in a vicinity. We report the design and implementation details of BANMAC integrated with the IEEE 802.15.4 protocol stack. We present experimental data which show that the packet loss rate (PLR) of BANMAC is significantly lower as compared to that of the IEEE~802.15.4 MAC. For comparable PLR, the power consumption of BANMAC is also significantly lower than that of the IEEE~802.15.4. For co-located networks, the convergence time to find a conflict-free channel allocation was approximately 1 s for the centralized coordination mechanism and was approximately 4 s for the distributed coordination mechanism.
ISBN:1467316938
9781467316934
ISSN:2325-2936
DOI:10.1109/DCOSS.2012.37