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A Comprehensive Survey of MAC Protocols for Wireless Body Area Networks
Abstract
In this paper, we present a comprehensive study of Medium Access Control
(MAC) protocols developed for Wireless Body Area Networks (WBANs). In WBANs,
small batteryoperated on-body or implanted biomedical sensor nodes are used to
monitor physiological signs such as temperature, blood pressure,
ElectroCardioGram (ECG), ElectroEncephaloGraphy (EEG) etc. We discuss design
requirements for WBANs with major sources of energy dissipation. Then, we
further investigate the existing designed protocols for WBANs with focus on
their strengths and weaknesses. Paper ends up with concluding remarks and open
research issues for future work.
... This poses a problem for long term monitoring of patients and thus there is a need for devising minimal power mechanisms on the energy-restricted body nodes. For attaining Quality of Service (QoS), the MAC layer acts as the principal layer of the communication protocol stack [8,9] The main synchronisation process between sensor nodes and the channel is performed at the MAC layer. A good and flexible MAC protocol must possess attributes to diminish power consumption due to packet collisions, overhearing of nodes, idle listening and overhead of control packet [9,10]. ...
... For attaining Quality of Service (QoS), the MAC layer acts as the principal layer of the communication protocol stack [8,9] The main synchronisation process between sensor nodes and the channel is performed at the MAC layer. A good and flexible MAC protocol must possess attributes to diminish power consumption due to packet collisions, overhearing of nodes, idle listening and overhead of control packet [9,10]. By overcoming these energy wastes, MAC protocols can prolong the lifetime of the WBAN. ...
... Therefore, T tx and T rx are formulated in Eqs. (9) and (10) respectively. ...
Two important criteria of wireless body area networks (WBANs) are low power consumption and delay. These criteria can be met by designing efficient medium access control (MAC) protocols. In this paper, two TDMA-based MAC protocols are proposed. The first protocol, TM–MAC makes use of only a main radio. The second proposed protocol, TWM–MAC makes use of a WUR alongside the main radio. The two proposed protocols are compared with different categories of standard MAC protocols and it is shown that they outperform the standard ones by improving the power consumption and delay. The TWM–MAC consumes 55% less power consumption than the Scheduled Channel Polling MAC (SCP–MAC) protocol for a high traffic scenario on the high-rate platform while the TM-MAC consumes 85% less power consumption than the SCP–MAC. For a low traffic scenario, the TWM–MAC performs 53.5% better than the SCP–MAC protocol and 77.5% better than the very low power MAC (VLPM) protocol on the high and low-rate platforms respectively. An improvement in delay was observed with the TWM–MAC protocol for high traffic situations. The TWM–MAC protocol surpasses the VLPM protocol by 81.1% in terms of latency for a high traffic scenario and 3.2% for a low traffic scenario.
... The resultant technical aspects in terms of (1) 65 communication reliability and (2) latency in transmissions, 66 provide valuable insight into the design and implementation of 67 WBANs [10]. According to the TG6 group, transmissions in a 68 WBAN must guarantee the following conditions: 69 ...
... received. This method has been reported as a very reliable 54 approach to estimate the channel conditions in stable-channel-55 Posture Detection [68], [96] static scenarios [1], [41], [44], which occur when the user 1 remain static and in environments with a reduced number of 2 reflecting objects. 3 4 ...
... The LQE solutions proposed in 80 literature following an inertial sensor-based method, can 81 estimate or predict the current channel quality, but the 82 algorithm is applied in a sender-side way. 83 The solution A-LQE, [68], [ agile and firstly adopted in WSNs, shows accurate estimation. 114 ...
Wireless Body Area Networks (WBANs) comprise several sensor nodes equipped with a short range radio-frequency transceiver, implanted and/or attached to the human body. Their low form-factor and localization imply less resources available and limited energy capabilities. Therefore, energy efficiency of WBANs is a critical issue since, in many cases, batteries cannot be replaced or recharged, requiring mechanisms to extend their life-time. The aim of Transmission Power Control (TPC) mechanisms, which can be combined with other energy-saving mechanisms, is to reduce the energy consumption, external interferences and Specific-Observation-Rate (SAR) in wireless communications by dynamically adjusting the transmission power output of data transmission, with the minimum effect on other performance aspects, such as reliability and latency. This survey describes and analyses the TPCs developed as a result of a synergy created by two mechanisms, a Link Quality Estimator (LQE) and the Transmission Power Level (TPL) control. Design choices, in terms of the solutions devised to each mechanism, as well as, the strategy adopted to combine them in a TPC, are highlighted. A comparison between the newest and most relevant research works in this area is provided as a guideline to future research. A taxonomy to classify the different TPC mechanisms developed is proposed.
... This poses a problem for long term monitoring of patients and thus there is a need for devising minimal power mechanisms on the energyrestricted body nodes. For attaining Quality of Service (QoS), the MAC layer acts as the principal layer of the communication protocol stack [8][9] The main synchronisation process between sensor nodes and the channel is performed at the MAC layer. A good and flexible MAC protocol must possess attributes to diminish power consumption due to packet collisions, overhearing of nodes, idle listening and overhead of control packet [9] [10]. ...
... For attaining Quality of Service (QoS), the MAC layer acts as the principal layer of the communication protocol stack [8][9] The main synchronisation process between sensor nodes and the channel is performed at the MAC layer. A good and flexible MAC protocol must possess attributes to diminish power consumption due to packet collisions, overhearing of nodes, idle listening and overhead of control packet [9] [10]. By overcoming these energy wastes, MAC protocols can prolong the lifetime of the WBAN. ...
Two important criteria of Wireless Body Area Networks (WBANs) are low power consumption and delay. These criteria can be met by designing efficient Medium Access Control (MAC) protocols. In this paper, two TDMA-based MAC protocols are proposed. The first protocol, TM-MAC makes use of only a main radio. The second proposed protocol, TWM-MAC makes use of a WUR alongside the main radio. The two proposed protocols are compared with different categories of standard MAC protocols and it is shown that they outperform the standard ones by improving the power consumption and delay. The TWM-MAC consumes 55% less power consumption than the Scheduled Channel Polling MAC (SCP-MAC) protocol for a high traffic scenario on the high-rate platform while the TM-MAC consumes 85% less power consumption than the SCP-MAC. For a low traffic scenario, the TWM-MAC performs 53.5% better than the SCP-MAC protocol and 77.5% better than the Very Low Power MAC (VLPM) protocol on the high and low-rate platforms respectively. An improvement in delay was observed with the TWM-MAC protocol for high traffic situations. The TWM-MAC protocol surpasses the VLPM protocol by 81.1% in terms of latency for a high traffic scenario and 3.2% for a low traffic scenario.
... A survey was carried out on MAC protocols in [10], and the authors considered some sources of energy wastage, design requirements, and the advantages and disadvantages of the MAC protocols. Since the work in [10] did not consider the grouping of MAC protocols according to their communication coverage, this limitation consequently creates a context for a new survey, so we presented a study that is different from [10] which classifies MAC protocols into short-and long-range coverage, and also the exploitation of 5G IoT radio standards and technologies MAC protocols which can be used to achieve energy efficiency in a WBAN system was introduced. ...
... Qualitative analysis of WBAN-specific MAC protocols[10,13] ...
Internet of things (IoT) is a concept that is currently gaining a lot of popularity as a result of its potential to be incorporated into many heterogeneous systems. Because of its diversity, integrating IoT is conceivable in almost all fields, including the healthcare sector. For instance, a promising technology in the healthcare sector known as wireless body area network (WBAN) could be integrated with the IoT to enhance its productivity. However, in order to guarantee the optimization of the operation of the healthcare applications facilitated by the WBAN-enabled IoT technology, there must be enough support from all the different protocol stack layers so as to satisfy the critical quality-of-service (QoS) requirements of the WBAN systems. Consequently, the medium access control (MAC) protocol has recently been gaining lots of attention in the area of WBANs due to its ability to manage and coordinate when a shared communication channel can be accessed. For the purpose of achieving efficient MAC protocols for WBAN-enabled IoT technology, this paper investigates some key MAC protocols that could be exploited in WBANs based on their characteristics, service specifications, technical issues such as energy wastage issues, and possible technical solutions were provided to enhance energy efficiency, channel utilization, data transmission rate, and dealy rate. Also, these MAC protocols were grouped and compared based on short- and long-range communication standards. Following this, future directions and open research issues are pointed out.
... Successive back-off windows for a) FCS-EB with contention window size 6, b) FCS-CB with contention window size 6, c) BEB-EB with contention window bounds(2,8), d) BEB-CB with contention window bounds(2,8). ...
... Successive back-off windows for a) FCS-EB with contention window size 6, b) FCS-CB with contention window size 6, c) BEB-EB with contention window bounds(2,8), d) BEB-CB with contention window bounds(2,8). ...
Wireless Body Area Networks (WBANs) are a fast-growing field fueled by the number of wearable devices developed for countless applications appearing on the market. To enable communication between a variety of those devices, the IEEE 802.15.6 standard was established. However, this standard has some intrinsic limitations in addressing the heterogeneity of the network nodes in terms of activity, data rates (from less than bit/s to multiple Mbit/s), energy availability, form factor, and location on, around or inside the body. To address these concerns, an alternative model is proposed that could serve as an extension of the IEEE 802.15.6 Standard. At its core is an adaptive and low-overhead synchronization scheme based on heartbeat sensing. This forms the base for a TDMA-based (Time Division Multiple Access) Media Access Control (MAC) protocol dedicated to multi-tier networks. While this effort focuses specifically on Capacitive Body-Coupled Communication (C-BCC), other physical layers can be easily incorporated as well. Based on these premises, this paper compares various random-access slot allocation approaches to accommodate the multiple data rates matching the system requirements, while incorporating a duty-cycling strategy anchored by heartbeat detection. This work proposes a novel, flexible, and robust solution, making use of heartbeat synchronization and addressing the corresponding challenges. It efficiently interconnects multiple device types over a wide range of data rates and targets a mesh of stars topology. At the cost of an increased communication latency, the proposed protocol outperforms the IEEE 802.15.4 MAC standard in terms of energy efficiency by a factor of at least 12x in a realistic scenario.
... It requires less energy since the probability of collision is low and there is no idle listening. However, [29] yes no yes no no Liu et al. [35] yes no no no no Ullah et al. [47] yes no no no no Pourmohseni et al. [38] yes yes no yes no Rahim et al. [40] n o n o n o y e s n o Gopalan et al. [24] yes no no yes no Qi et al. [39] yes no no yes no Gopalan et al. [23] yes no no no yes Demirkol et al. [17] n o n o n o n o y e s [47] affirm that additional energy is needed in Static-TDMA for the periodic time synchronization requirement. Pourmohseni et al. [38] show that Dynamic-TDMA use the low energy consumption and low collision features of Static-TDMA in a dynamic way. ...
... Pourmohseni et al. [38] show that Dynamic-TDMA use the low energy consumption and low collision features of Static-TDMA in a dynamic way. As for CSMA/CA, Rahim et al. [40] explain that a major weakness of this protocol is the high power consumption resulting from the continuous collision detection and avoidance requirements. Also, Pourmohseni et al. [38], Gopalan et al. [24], and Qi et al. [39] present a comparison between Static-TDMA and CSMA/CA protocols, and show that the power consumption of CSMA/CA is high compared to the low energy consumption induced in Static-TDMA. ...
The rapid development of medical sensors has increased the interest in Wireless Body Area Network (WBAN) applications where physiological data from the human body and its environment is gathered, monitored, and analyzed to take the proper measures. In WBANs, it is essential to design MAC protocols that ensure adequate performance and Quality of Service (QoS). This paper investigates Medium Access Control (MAC) protocols used in WBAN, and compares their performance in a high traffic environment with respect to different QoS and network performance metrics. Such scenario can be induced in case of emergency for example, where physiological data collected from all sensors on human body should be sent simultaneously to take appropriate action. This study can also be extended to cover collaborative WBAN systems where information from different bodies is sent simultaneously leading to high traffic. OPNET simulations are performed to compare the performance of the different MAC protocols under the same experimental conditions. A new MAC scheme aiming to enhance the delay, throughput, and energy performance of the system is then proposed and compared to existing protocols, to evaluate its performance in high traffic environment.
... • Reliability: This term usually refers to packet loss probability and transmission delay which depends on the channel condition and traffic requirements. Reliability can be improved by implementing robust and error resilient transmission mechanisms, implementing re-transmission algorithms and adaptive scheduling schemes [24]. • Throughput: In a WBAN, the throughput reduces due to collision, loss of connectivity and dynamic human activities. ...
... The PMAC is slow in adapting to changes [24]. In addition, there are chances of collision or packet drop in normal traffic flows because of a small CW. ...
... • Reliability: This term usually refers to packet loss probability and transmission delay which depends on the channel condition and traffic requirements. Reliability can be improved by implementing robust and error resilient transmission mechanisms, implementing re-transmission algorithms and adaptive scheduling schemes [24]. • Throughput: In a WBAN, the throughput reduces due to collision, loss of connectivity and dynamic human activities. ...
... It uses AES-128 encryption to prevent active or passive attachment on data. Drawbacks: The PMAC is slow in adapting to changes [24]. In addition, there are chances of collision or packet drop in normal traffic flows because of a small CW. ...
IEEE 802.15.6 is a Wireless Body Area Network (WBAN) standard proposed to facilitate the exponentially growing interest in the field of health monitoring. This standard is flexible and outlines multiple basic Medium Access Control (MAC) protocols that are contention based and collision free to meet the WBAN Quality of Service (QoS) challenges. Typically, current research trends in WBAN MAC focus on designing a hybrid MAC that is a combination of basic MAC protocols. In this paper, we provide a first detailed survey of existing hybrid MAC protocols based on IEEE 802.15.6 which would be useful for the related research community. Firstly, the paper lists the design challenges of a WBAN MAC. Secondly, it highlights the significance of hybrid MAC protocols in meeting the design challenges while comparing them to standard MAC protocols. Thirdly, a critical and thorough comparison of existing hybrid MAC protocols is presented in terms of network QoS and WBAN specific parameters. Lastly, we identify key open research areas that are often neglected in hybrid MAC design and further propose some possible directions for future research.
... Since then, several others have been proposing classifications of MAC protocols [20] [21] [23]- [26] [28] [29] [31]- [36] [38]. Table I lists a set of surveys that address MAC protocol classification in wireless networks. ...
... In this case, MAC protocols were analyzed considering how efficient the use of medium access mechanisms is to save energy while keeping acceptable performance. In addition, surveys [18] [20] [23]- [25] [29] [36] analyzed similar aspects, but applied to other scenarios and technologies (e.g., different MAC protocols in Ad Hoc Networks, Cognitive Radio Networks (CRNs), Wireless Body Area Networks (WBANs), and Wireless Local Area Networks (WLANs)). However, the principle of analyzing the mode-of-operation versus the resulted performance and energy efficiency of MAC protocols remains. ...
Self-organizing networks able to adapt to changes in the environment have already been a longstanding research topic. Given the limited number of license-free Industrial, Scientific, and Medical (ISM) radio bands, wireless technologies end up competing with one another for the wireless spectrum. As such, the proper employment of Medium Access Control (MAC) protocols is essential to guarantee efficient and reliable wireless communication. At the data link level, there has been extensive research towards programmable and more future-proof MAC protocols (e.g., Software-Defined Radios (SDRs), which enable to reconfigure the entire protocol and hence access/control fine-grained radio functionalities). However, actual deployments are so far limited because of performance issues and cost. With the increasing popularity of Software-Defined Networking (SDN), also in the wireless domain, and the increasing performance of SDRs, we are evolving into a fully programmable data link layer. In this survey, we deliver: a landscape of the state-of-the-art on programmable MAC protocols; a coherent terminology that represents scope and level of programmability supported; an in-depth study of their advantages and disadvantages; and a discussion about future research challenges on MAC programmability. Many surveys have investigated the use of specific MAC protocols for a wide range of optimization criteria and application demands. This survey is the first that investigates the scope and the level of programmability that MAC protocols support.
... Ignoring the cognitive radio and spectrum sharing, the majority of MAC protocols for WBANs are either contentionbased, such as CSMA/CA or reservation-based, such as timedivision multiple access (TDMA) [4]. The power consumption in CSMA, which is a result of collisions, is a major shortcoming [51]. Besides, physiological data from WBANs are typically correlated, i.e., a single physiological change triggers sensors at different parts of the body at the same time. ...
... In CR-enabled WBANS, the emphasis is on decreasing the amount of energy consumed for searching idle channels. Collision of packets, overhearing of data of other sensors, listening to channels to find out whether other WBAN nodes are using them, and the use of control messages are major factors that waste some of the power in WBANs [51]. ...
We present a review of spectrum sharing wireless body area networks. We investigate how cognitive radio and dynamic spectrum access are used for body area networks to save spectral resources. Specifically, we study the features associated with the usage of the three major cognitive radio paradigms of underlay, interweave, and overlay in these networks. We further put forward some use cases in medical applications. In this regard, we provide an overview of the existing schemes on interference mitigation for coexistence of different devices involving wireless body area networks. Further, we proceed with existing energy efficient medium access control protocols for cognitive radio-enabled body area networks. In addition, we outline the challenges and obstacles of implementing spectrum sharing concepts for body sensor networks.
... Data streaming from human body to monitoring station using wireless communication channel is an energy consuming process. Low power signal processing and energy efficient communication mechanisms prolong lifespan of these small devices (Rahim et al., 2012). In WBANs, sensor nodes of small size with low power and limited computational capabilities are attached or implanted to human body for measurement of physiological signs. ...
... Similarly, Quality of Service (QoS) is an important goal to achieve in WBANs. This includes latency, jitter, guaranteed communication and security (Rahim et al., 2012;Sruthi, 2016). ...
Wireless Body Area Networks (WBAN) is referred to as a body sensor network (BSN), is a wireless network of wearable computing devices. Various MAC protocols with objectives have been proposed for WBANs. In this paper is evaluate, analyzing, and comparing the performance of three types of MAC protocols: Tunable Medium Access Control (TMAC), IEEE 802.15.4 (ZIGBEE MAC) and IEEE 802.15.6 (BASELINE MAC), as they are used on wireless body area networks for different performance metrics. The performance evaluation and analysis of the MAC protocols (TMAC, ZIGBEE MAC, and BASELINE MAC) are carried out under different network conditions in order to find the best MAC protocol which is the most suitable for this type of network and also to find how to improve the performance within these type of networks.
... h) Quality of Services (QoSs) QoSs are required for different type of data transmission in WBANs. The author in [18] describes the patient data into three types including critical, sensitive and ordinary data. In critical data, the sensors collect the data of EEG, heartbeat. ...
... IEEE 802.15.16 is another standard which aims to support WBANs requirements and handle low cost, low power and reliable transmission. This standard has data rates up to 10 Mbps [18]. This standard main objective is to minimizing the Specific Absorption Rate (SAR). ...
Wireless Body Area Networks (WBANs) are designed for monitoring the patient’s conditions and assist them in critical health situation. Tiny size wireless sensors sense the data related to patient health. Further, the sensed data sends to base station for further process. The base station sends the data to the nearest sink node or to the nearest medical center or hospital. In order to complete this entire process, wireless sensors need efficient routing without any error or delay. The routing protocols have been suffered with various challenges and issues which are related to the routing and energy issues. This paper provides a comprehensive survey of important existing routing protocols for WBANs. Paper also discusses the protocols strengths, limitations with their critical analysis.
... Energy efficiency, hence, is of most significant for WBAN protocols and key emphasis should be given to this feature, while designing the WBAN. The Medium Access Control (MAC) is an appropriate solution of this said problem [2]. MAC protocols are very efficient because it improves the lifetime of the network by reducing data rate and energy wastage. ...
Wireless Body Area Network (WBAN) is an exclusively designed Wireless Sensor Networks that used in today’s health-care system. The central challenge in WBAN is to transfer the medical data with limited energy and with high reliability. The IEEE 802.15.4 MAC Protocol is a standard model used to consume less energy by providing low data rate. This paper aimed to present a novel protocol PD-MAC, an enhanced version of IEEE 802.15.4 to achieve the above goal. The main objective of this protocol is to transmit the packets according to their priorities. It also improves the retransmission and packet drop process by introducing an additional slot to define Starvation Index in the super-frame of IEEE 802.15.4. A node has to start its transmission when the timer is set to zero. A node has to sense the channel status before transmission begins. The data are transmitted according to their priorities only when it senses the free channel. However if the channel is not free then retransmission of packet will be carried out and in each retransmission process the starvation index increments the priority of the packet. When the packet priority raises to high then it transmits the packet by considering it as high emergency packet. For energy efficiency a max limit is define to retransmit a data packet. This protocol has been simulated using Castalia 3.2 environment and the result validate that our proposed protocol provides better service in terms of least Packet Delay and lowest Energy Consumption to its counterparts.
... In the literature, there are various surveys on WBANs [3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15]. However, the majority of these surveys have focused on the applications [16,17], technologies [18][19][20], standards [21], and design issues [17,[22][23][24] of WBANs rather than evaluating various research efforts made towards achieving efficient MAC protocols for WBANs, which is the main objective of this survey. ...
Wireless body area networks (WBANs) have emerged as a promising technology for health monitoring due to their high utility and important role in improving human health. WBANs consist of a number of small battery-operated biomedical sensor nodes placed on the body or implanted, which are used to monitor and transmit important parameters such as blood pressure, electrocardiogram (ECG), and electroencephalogram (EEG). WBANs have strict requirements on energy efficiency and reliability during data collection and transmission. The most appropriate layer to address these requirements is the MAC layer. Medium access control protocols play an essential role in controlling the operation of radio transceivers and significantly affect the power consumption of the whole network. In this paper, we present a comprehensive survey of the most relevant and recent MAC protocols developed for WBANs. We discuss design requirements of a good MAC protocol for WBANs. We further review the different channel access mechanisms for WBANs. Then, we investigate the existing designed MAC protocols for WBANs with a focus on their features along with their strengths and weaknesses. Finally, we summarize the results of this work and draw conclusions.
... An excellent survey related to wearable sensors in WBANs is provided in [17]. The authors have discussed medical applications (ECG, EEG, detection of blood glucose level, respiration rate, etc) and non-medical application (daily exercise monitoring) of several types of wearable sensors. ...
... An excellent survey related to wearable sensors in WBANs is provided in [17]. The authors have discussed medical applications (ECG, EEG, detection of blood glucose level, respiration rate, etc) and non-medical application (daily exercise monitoring) of several types of wearable sensors. ...
Wireless body area network (WBAN) being a sub-domain of wireless sensor network (WSN) is a new emerging technology for healthcare applications. A WBAN consists of low-power tiny wireless nodes placed on or around the human body that continuously observe vital health signs of a patient. These sensors are capable of sending information of physiological parameters taken from human body to other devices for diagnosis procedures and prescription. WBAN provides ubiquitous healthcare services and enables greater mobility without restricting human normal activities, as the medical personnel can observe the patient health conditions based on the data received through the wireless network. This research work provides a WBAN based healthcare monitoring system that can provide the electrocardiogram (ECG), heartbeat, and human body temperature information. The wireless transmission of the received data from human body is performed by using Zigbee IEEE802.15.4 communication standard. The physiological data will be communicated to remote medical server where data is stored and analyzed. In case any disease is diagnosed, medical personnel can provide immediate assistance to the patients.
... Overhead [24] is an important metric while routing the information in the wireless body area network. Then the performance of the suggested method is calculated the overhead metric because it chooses the information routing path with minimum overheads for different amount of information which is depicted in the Fig. 5. ...
The wireless body area network (WBAN) is the developing technology which is used to monitor the patient’s activities. The main challenges in the WBAN are Qos, Energy consumption during the information transformation, Delay and security. Thus the paper contributes the proposed method which is used to manage the above challenges. Initially the node has been placed on the human body which is configured with the mobile devices for transmitting the information. The priority of the information is decided by the node or sensor placement by default head and heart sensors. Then the information is forwarded to the nearest remedy subscribed base station through cluster heads by using the virtual MIMO method. This method uses the opportunistic approach to minimize the decision making time of the priority and the transmission queueing process. The proposed system used to combine the two or more priority information with the help of the ACK time and PATH BEACON that utilizes the maximum bandwidth to forward the information without making the collision and delay.
... Wireless body area network (WBAN) is new promising sub-field of WSN. A key application of WBAN is health-care services [23]. Body sensors are implanted in the body or positioned on the body of the patient. ...
In current era of technology, applications of wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are rising
in various fields. The deployment of WSNs for real life applications is greater than
before. Still, the energy constraints remain one of the key issues; it prevents the complete
utilization of WSN technology. Sensors typically powered with battery, which have
insufficient life span. Even though renewable energy sources like solar energy or piezoelectric means are used as supplementary energy in WSNs, it is still some degree of
reserve to consume energy judiciously. Proficient energy routing is thus a key
requirement for a trustworthy design of a wireless sensor network. In this article, we
advise a new Gateway Based Energy-Efficient Clustering Routing Protocol (M-GEAR)
for WSNs. We divide the sensor nodes into four logical regions based on their distance
from the gateway node and Base Station (BS). We install BS faraway from sensing area
and a gateway node at the centre of the sensing area. If the distance of a sensor node from BS or gateway is less than predefined distance threshold, the node uses direct
communication to transmit its sensed data. We divide the rest of nodes into two equal
regions whose distance is beyond the threshold distance. We then divide these two
regions into clusters and each region elects its own Cluster Heads (CHs) independent of
other region. We compare performance of our protocol with LEACH (Low Energy
Adaptive Clustering Hierarchy). Performance analysis and compared statistic results
show that our proposed protocol perform well in terms of energy consumption and
network lifetime. We also propose a reliable, power efficient and high throughput routing protocol for wireless body area networks (WBANs). We use multi hop topology to minimize energy consumption and maximizing network lifetime. We use a cost function to select parent node or forwarder. Proposed cost function selects a parent node, which has high residual energy and less distance to sink. Residual energy parameter balances the energy consumption among the sensor nodes and distance parameter ensures successful packet delivery to sink. Simulation results shows that proposed protocol enhance the network stability period and nodes stay alive for longer period. Longer stability period contributes high packet delivery to sink which is major interest for continuous patient monitoring.
... At the data-link layer, energy can be saved by intelligent medium access control protocols that aim to turn the radio off whenever packet transmission or receipt is not expected. Several such MAC protocols have been developed in the literature [174,166]: such as Preamble-based TDMA [205], Heartbeat Driven MAC (H-MAC) [121], Reservation-based Dynamic TDMA (DTDMA) [120], Distributed Queuing Body Area Network (DQBAN) [153], etc. In addition, several technologies such as Bluetooth especially Bluetooth Low Energy, Zigbee, IEEE 802.15.6 are targeting WBAN [81]. ...
The rapid advances in sensors and ultra-low power wireless communication has enabled a new generation of wireless sensor networks: Wireless Body Area Networks (WBAN).
In WBAN, tiny devices, deployed in/on or around human body, are able to detect and collect the physiological phenomena of the human body (such as: temperature, blood pressure, ECG, SpO2, etc.), and transmit this information to a collector point (i.e Sink) that will process it, take decisions, alert and reply.
WBAN is a recent challenging area. There are several concerns in this area ranging from energy efficient communication to designing delay efficient protocols that support nodes dynamic induced by human body mobility. Links have a very short range and a quality that varies with the wearer’s posture. The transmission power is kept low to improve devices autonomy and to reduce wearers electromagnetic exposition. Consequently, the effect of body absorption, reflections and interference cannot be neglected and it is difficult to maintain a direct link (one-hop) between the Sink and all WBAN nodes. Thus, multi-hop communication represents a viable alternative.
In this work we investigate energy-efficient multi-hop communication protocols in WBAN. We are interested in WBAN where sensors are placed on the body. We focus on two communication primitives: broadcast and converge-cast. We analyze several strategies inspired from the area of DTN and WSN. These investigations open new and challenging research directions to design novel protocols for multi-hop communication including a cross-layer approach.
... The main advantage of DTDMA remains its high energy efficiency since nodes only transmit data in their allocated time slots, and remain inactive all the other times. They do not encounter collisions, overhearing or idle listening problems [23,24]. ...
In Body Sensor Networks (BSNs), two types of events should be addressed: periodic and emergency events. Traffic rate is usually low during periodic observation, and becomes very high upon emergency. One of the main and challenging requirements of BSNs is to design Medium Access Control (MAC) protocols that guarantee immediate and reliable transmission of data in emergency situations, while maintaining high energy efficiency in non-emergency conditions. In this paper, we propose a new emergency aware hybrid DTDMA/DS-CDMA protocol that can accommodate BSN traffic variations by addressing emergency and periodic traffic requirements. It takes advantage of the high delay efficiency of DS-CDMA in traffic burst, and the high energy efficiency of DTDMA in periodic traffic. The proposed scheme is evaluated in terms of delay, packet drop percentage, and energy consumption. Different OPNET simulations are performed for various number of nodes carrying emergency data, and for various payload sizes. The protocol performance is compared to other existing hybrid protocols. Results show that the proposed scheme outperforms the others in terms of delay and packet drop percentage for different number of nodes carrying emergency data, as well as for different payload sizes. It also offers the highest energy efficiency during periodic observation, while adjusting the energy consumption during emergency by assigning spreading codes only to nodes holding emergency data.
... Therefore, the design of energy efficient MAC protocol is the major concern to minimize the energy wastage of body sensor nodes. IEEE 802.15.4 [2] is a low-power communication standard that describes the specifications for Physical layer (PHY) and MAC layer of a low data rate WBAN with low-latency requirements. Random Access MAC protocols (CSMA/CA) and Schedule-based MAC protocols (TDMA) are the two major medium access schemes in WBAN. ...
... Media Access Control (MAC) protocols play an important role in WBAN [2]. Since the energy consumption of the radio is usually higher than other components in a WBAN node, a well designed MAC protocol should efficiently duty-cycle the radio in order to save energy and conserve limited batteries on sensors, to avoid collision and reduce control overhead, and to minimise idle listening and overhearing, etc. ...
... Likewise, many studies have generally covered the MAC protocols in WBANs. For example, in [36], Rahim et al. discuss WBAN design requirements in terms of energy dissipation and the existing MAC protocols in the light of their strengths and weaknesses. In [37], Bradai et al. discuss the existing MAC protocols with a focus on the design requirements of WBAN. ...
In Wireless Body Area Networks (WBANs), every healthcare application that is based on physical sensors is responsible for monitoring the vital signs data of patient. WBANs applications consist of heterogeneous and dynamic traffic loads. Routine patient’s observation is described as low-load traffic while an alarming situation that is unpredictable by nature is referred to as high-load traffic. This paper offers a thematic review of traffic adaptive Medium Access Control (MAC) protocols in WBANs. First, we have categorized them based on their goals, methods, and metrics of evaluation. The Zigbee standard IEEE 802.15.4 and the baseline MAC IEEE 802.15.6 are also reviewed in terms of traffic adaptive approaches. Furthermore, a comparative analysis of the protocols is made and their performances are analyzed in terms of delay, packet delivery ratio (PDR), and energy consumption. The literature shows that no review work has been done on traffic adaptive MAC protocols in WBANs. This review work, therefore, could add enhancement to traffic adaptive MAC protocols and will stimulate a better way of solving the traffic adaptivity problem.
... Although this mode does not guarantee delivering the data frames within a certain time and the clear channel assessment (CCA) leads to high energy consumption [Rahim et al., 2012]. ...
In recent years, Wireless Sensor Network based on the IEEE 802.15.4 and ZigBee standards become widely used technologies in such networks. It is considered as flexible solutions for low cost, low power consumption, using free radio frequency, and easy to install networks. They can be used in various applications and in variety areas, such as; military, healthcare, smart homes and building management systems. Due to the reduced power consumption in the ZigBee standards, a lower data rate is obtained (250 kbps). This will reduce the area of applications of this standard, especially if high data rate, an efficient and quality communicate on is required. In this work a healthcare application is chosen, where real time is an important requirement for such a critical application. Parameters like end-to-end delay, the throughput and the ratio of packet loss are the best candidate for the performance and quality of services measurement. In this study, the focus mainly is on the performance of an ECG (Electrocardiogram) signal transmission through deferent scenarios of wireless sensor network using IEEE 802.15.4 and ZigBee standards. A suggested packet interarrival time adapted to the maximum payload size allowed in the ZigBee standard. Then many scenarios are simulated to observe the performance of WSN used in healthcare applications.
... Additionally, QoS-aware MAC protocols for WBANs are reviewed elsewhere [17], and other existing reviews about MAC protocols for WBANs are surveyed [18][19][20][21][22][23][24][25]. Further, in Table 2, we classify the QoS-aware MAC protocols mentioned above based on parameters, including access mechanism, priority assignment, QoS parameters, admission control, energy awareness, and cross-layer architecture. ...
Wireless body area networks (WBANs) consist of tiny sensors that enable monitoring the health status of a person. quality of service (QoS) is a major challenge for WBANs due to the importance of vital sign information. Therefore, many QoS-based medium access control (MAC) protocols and technologies have been developed to overcome this problem. Standardization of various technologies and protocols must be addressed. ISO/IEEE 11073 personal health data standards aim to provide interoperability between healthcare devices and technologies. This paper presents a new QoS-aware cross-layer MAC protocol based on the ISO/IEEE 11073 standards that employs a slot allocation scheme, multi-channel architecture, priority mechanism, admission control, and cross-layer solution. The proposed MAC protocol has been modeled and simulated by OPNET Modeler. In addition, the proposed MAC protocol is compared with standard technologies and recent protocols in the literature, and it achieves better results for end-to-end delay, packet loss ratio, and throughput parameters.
... WUR), software (i.e. MAC and routing algorith m) and duty cycle optimization approaches [9] [10]. Prev ious research highlighted that there are mainly three types of rendez-vous schemes: a) Pure synchronous: The nodes' clocks are pre -synchronized so the wake-up time of each node is known in advance. ...
In power-limited wireless devices such as wireless sensor networks, wearable components, and Internet of Things devices energy efficiency is a critical concern. These devices are usually battery operated and have a radio transceiver that is typically their most power-hungry block. Wake-up radio schemes can be used to achieve a reasonable balance among energy consumption, range, data receiving capabilities and response time. In this paper, a high-sensitivity low power wake-up radio receiver (WUR) for wireless sensor networks is presented. The wake-up radio is comprised of a fully passive differential RF-to-DC converter that rectifies the incident RF signal, a low-power comparator and an ultra low power microcontroller to detects the envelope of the on-off keying (OOK) wake-up data used as address. We designed and implemented a novel low power tunable wake up radio with addressing capability, a minimal power consumption of only 196nW and a maximum sensitivity of -55dBm and minimal wake up time of 130μs without addressing and around 1,6ms with 2byte addressing at 10Kbit/s data rate. The flexibility of the solution makes the wake up radio suitable for both power constrained low range application (such as Body Area Network) or applications with long range needs. The wake up radio can work also at different frequencies and the addressing capability directly on board helps reduce false positives. Experimental on field results demonstrate the low power of the solution, the high sensitivity and the functionality.
One of the promising technologies to monitor the body of a patient and sending data acquired to the doctor is WBAN. WBAN consists of multiple miniature sensors attached to human body that constantly monitor the patient’s body and send the data to the doctors. This avoids not only errors that can occur during in-efficient monitoring by human staff, but also helps to utilize the human resources at some other field. One of the biggest challenges in designing an effective WBAN network is to construct a network which not only is power and energy efficient but also is less prone to packet loss or packet corruption during the transmission. This helps in long term monitoring of patients without effecting their daily life or prevent any serious damage due to late transmission of data. The focus of this paper is on designing an optimal transmission protocol using CSMA/CA multiple access protocol having an efficient energy usage, a high transmission rate and preventing the loss of data during wireless transmission due to interference from adjacent band gaps or due to the presence of outside networks.
Cyber-physical autonomous vehicular system (CAVS) plays an important role in the automotive industries to enable interactions among functioning elements, including sensors and actuators, in order to ensure seamless data exchange and communications. Internet of things (IoT) is one of the key enabling technologies for designing such a system. In this chapter IoT is incorporated on the vehicular system to address the challenges and issues on designing an efficient CAVS. Although incorporating IoT on CAVS requires full consideration of all the protocol stacks, this article is aimed to focus only on the analysis from a media access control (MAC) layer point of view. More specifically, this article highlights the impact of IoT on vehicular systems based on the statistical information, state-of-the-art on MAC perspective, the framework of CAVS, and the open research issues. The outcome of this work will assist significantly in designing an efficient CAVS.
The major difference between underwater sensor networks (UWSNs) and terrestrial sensor networks is the use of acoustic signals as a communication medium rather than radio signals. The main reason behind this is the poor performance of radio signals in water. UWSNs have some distinct characteristics which makes them more research-oriented which is the large propagation delay, high error rate, low bandwidth, and limited energy. UWSNs have their application in the field of oceanographic, data collection, pollution monitoring, off-shore exploration, disaster prevention, assisted navigation, tactical surveillance, etc. In UWSNs the main advantages of protocol design are to a reliable and effective data transmission from source to destination. Among those, energy efficiency plays an important role in underwater communication. The main energy sources of UWSNs are batteries which are very difficult to replace frequently. There are two popular underwater protocols that are DBR and EEDBR. DBR is one of the popular routing techniques which don't use the full dimensional location information. In this article the authors use an efficient area localization scheme for UWSNs to minimize the energy hole created. Rather than finding the exact sensor position, this technique will estimate the position of every sensor node within certain area. In addition to that the authors introduced a RF based location finding and multilevel power transmission scheme. Simulation results shows that the proposed scheme produces better result than its counter parts.
The current development in the field of public health allowed a profound demographic change especially in industrialized countries. The increase in life expectancy is accompanied by an increase in the number of elderly people, including those with chronic illnesses and loss of autonomy. Hence the necessity to provide care with good quality and low price. In this context, many research focuses on the use of advanced technologies such as wireless body area networks WBANs, to improve the care quality and remote
monitoring. These networks present challenges in terms of reliability and energy
consumption. The abuse of energy consumption comes from the communication
wireless mode between the sensors and the coordinator. The main objective of this thesis is to answer the above-mentioned challenges in a WBAN system of remote medical monitoring. To achieve this goal, we studied architectures, protocols used in wireless communication and traffic types to find the most suitable for the intended application. Thus, we have proposed a MAC protocol that aims to improve the reliability and extend the network lifetime. These proposals have been the subject of theoretical study and simulation performance analysis.
In this paper, we investigate an energy harvesting wireless body area network (WBAN) with relay cooperation, where the destination nodes and the relay simultaneously harvest energy from the radio frequency (RF) source, then the destination nodes transmit data to the source by maximum ratio combining (MRC) transmission mode. We study the optimal design for relay power splitting ratio in each relaying sub-slot and the destination nodes power allocation to maximize the sum-throughput with the proposed protocol. The optimization problem is divided into two cases, destination node power limit (DPL) case and relay power limit (RPL) case. In essence, the problem is a joint-objective optimization and is solved by the Lagrangian multiplier method. Simulation results show that our proposed optimal method can greatly improve the sum-throughput compared with conventional mean power allocation (MPA) method and mean time allocation (MTA) method. Moreover, a significant sum-throughput promotion is achieved on the RPL case over the DPL case.
Body Area Network (BAN) is emerging as promising technology for wireless network and widely being deployed in the field of medical applications for data extraction, storage and transfer of details regarding custom-made health care services. Securing of inter sensor communication within BANs is critical in preserving the health data privacy and also for ensuring safe healthcare delivery. The cumulative usage of wireless communication networks and the constant shrinking of electrical devices have endowed the development of Wireless Body Area Networks (WBANs). This research paper discusses the various authentication schemes and protocols available for WBAN. This research provides a survey of multilevel authentication protocols for WBANs. This paper also lists out the design issues in WBAN Authentication protocols. The outcome of this research provides essential future directions for further research on advancement of WBANs. Finally, this paper provides a summary on exposed research issues and challenges and provides the direction for future research in the area of Authentication protocols for Body Area Networks.
The recent evolution of wireless sensor technology is providing unlimited opportunities to remote monitoring and health care applications using Wireless Body Area Sensor Networks (WBASNs). While using WBASN for patient monitoring, emergency situations can appear anytime that requires immediate action without much delay. This leads to the requirement for a new energy-efficient and delay-aware scheme for WBASNs. eDPVT is fulfilling such requirements by proposing a scheme for the Media Access Control (MAC) layer of WBASN. eDPVT is designed to reduce the packet delivery delay for emergency data, which is being transmitted from heterogeneous biosensor nodes to eDPVT base station node in WBASN. In addition to the delay, this scheme also reduces energy consumption with the introduction of variable-length time slots in the context-free period of the super frame. eDPVT handles emergency situations with least delay with the help of preemption mechanism used in this scheme. For performance evaluation, eDPVT is compared with eMC-MAC protocol. ns3 simulation of eDPVT results show that eDPVT is energy-efficient scheme, and there is a significant reduction in average packet delivery delay.
In wireless body area sensor networks (WBASNs), Quality of Service (QoS) provision for patient monitoring systems in terms of time-critical deadlines, high throughput and energy efficiency is a challenging task. The periodic data from these systems generates a large number of small packets in a short time period which needs an efficient channel access mechanism. The IEEE 802.15.4 standard is recommended for low power devices and widely used for many wireless sensor networks applications. It provides a hybrid channel access mechanism at the Media Access Control (MAC) layer which plays a key role in overall successful transmission in WBASNs. There are many WBASN's MAC protocols that use this hybrid channel access mechanism in variety of sensor applications. However, these protocols are less efficient for patient monitoring systems where life critical data requires limited delay, high throughput and energy efficient communication simultaneously. To address these issues, this paper proposes a frame aggregation scheme by using the aggregated-MAC protocol data unit (A-MPDU) which works with the IEEE 802.15.4 MAC layer. To implement the scheme accurately, we develop a traffic patterns analysis mechanism to understand the requirements of the sensor nodes in patient monitoring systems, then model the channel access to find the performance gap on the basis of obtained requirements, finally propose the design based on the needs of patient monitoring systems. The mechanism is initially verified using numerical modelling and then simulation is conducted using NS2.29, Castalia 3.2 and OMNeT++. The proposed scheme provides the optimal performance considering the required QoS.
Healthcare expenses are a growing concern in most countries. This has forced medical researchers to look for trusted and ambulatory health monitoring of patient's vital signs. The objective is to reduce patient visits and the use of medical and support staff for frequent examinations. Wireless Body Area Networks (WBAN) consist of implanted, or worn, tiny health monitoring sensor nodes so that the vital body parameters and the movements of the patient can be recorded and communicated to the medical facilities for processing, diagnosis and prescription. WBAN is required to have small form and low power consumption. Reducing energy consumption of the sensor and communication equipment is one of the key research areas. It is also important for WBAN be secure, protected and reliable. Failure to acquire authentic and correct medical data may prevent a patient from being treated effectively, or even lead to wrong treatments. As patient identity can be obtained by correlating physiological information, privacy concerns must be addressed for wide acceptance of the technology. While security is paramount, the cost of implementing security techniques in WBAN may be prohibitive. It, therefore, becomes necessary to find cryptographic solutions that consume less energy. Research efforts are being made to reduce the cost of cryptography used in WBAN. In this paper authors discuss the current and future security solutions for low energy WBAN.
The current paper proposes a low emission media access control (MAC) compliant frequency shift keying modulator to operate within wireless body area networks (WBANs). Frequency modulation is achieved by utilizing a ramp to encode the bit stream into two distinct frequencies. The negotiated frequency of operation for dynamic frequency shifting and frequency encoding is achieved changing the gradient of the ramp thorough load cap and charging current in a charge pump. A tent map chaotic map has been utilized to module the signal resulting in lowering EMI Emissions. The work has been implemented on 0.18µm AMS technology and silicon measurement results presented.
Interference mitigation becomes increasingly important in Wireless Body Area Networks (WBANs) when multiple co-located WBANs operate on the same or adjacent channels. In this paper, we propose an efficient decentralized interference mitigation (DIM) scheme for coexisting WBANs. The superframe is divided into Beacon, scheduling phase (SP) and contention access phase (CAP), in which DIM uses CSMA/CA in CAP and scheduling in SP. In DIM, hub will adjust the length between SP and CAP dynamically according to its recent network performance. Specifically, the length of SP will be reduced when the channel utilization in SP decreases, and will be expanded on the contrary. DIM combines the SINR and interference performance. Nodes in the overlapping region tends to be interfered and will get lower access priority. Hub allocates the slots to the nodes based on the DIM algorithm. The simulation results show that the DIM algorithm archive much higher throughput and lower latency under the interference scenario.
Resource efficiency is one of the most important factors that should be considered when developing a MAC protocol for CPS like WBAN. This chapter presents the critical literature review of different approaches used to design MAC protocols to minimize energy consumption. Control packet overhead of communication, idle listening of nodes to receive expected data packets, overhearing, and collision of data packets are the major sources of energy dissipation in WBANs. A versatile MAC protocol should have the capabilities to minimize energy dissipation in aforementioned situations. An introduction of typical MAC protocols (which are not based on IEEE 802.15.4) for WBAN is presented in this chapter with focus on their strengths and weaknesses.
This paper proposes S-MAC, a medium-access control (MAC) protocol designed for wireless sensor networks. Wireless sensor networks use battery-operated computing and sensing devices. A network of these devices will collaborate for a common application such as environmental monitoring. We expect sensor networks to be deployed in an ad hoc fashion, with individual nodes remaining largely inactive for long periods of time, but then becoming suddenly active when something is detected. These characteristics of sensor networks and applications motivate a MAC that is different from traditional wireless MACs such as IEEE 802.11 in almost every way: energy conservation and self-configuration are primary goals, while per-node fairness and latency are less important. S-MAC uses three novel techniques to reduce energy consumption and support self-configuration. To reduce energy consumption in listening to an idle channel, nodes periodically sleep. Neighboring nodes form virtual clusters to auto-synchronize on sleep
WiseMAC is a medium access control protocol designed for the WiseNET™ wireless sensor network. It is based on CSMA and uses the preamble sampling technique to minimize the power consumed when listening to an idle medium. A unique feature of this protocol is to exploit the knowledge of the sampling schedule of its direct neighbors in order to use a wake-up preamble of minimized size. This scheme allows not only to reduce the transmit and the receive power consumption, but also brings a drastic reduction of the energy wasted due to overhearing. Backoff and medium reservation schemes have been selected to provide fairness and collision avoidance. WiseMAC requires no set-up signaling, no network-wide time synchronization and is adaptive to the traffic load. It provides an ultra-low average power consumption in low traffic conditions and a high energy efficiency in high traffic conditions.
This paper presents an energy-efficient medium access control protocol suitable for communication in a wireless body area network for remote monitoring of physiological signals such as EEG and ECG. The protocol takes advantage of the static nature of the body area network to implement the effective time-division multiple access (TDMA) strategy with very little amount of overhead and almost no idle listening (by static, we refer to the fixed topology of the network investigated). The main goal is to develop energy-efficient and reliable communication protocol to support streaming of large amount of data. TDMA synchronization problems are discussed and solutions are presented. Equations for duty cycle calculation are also derived for power consumption and battery life predictions. The power consumption model was also validated through measurements. Our results show that the protocol is energy efficient for streaming communication as well as sending short bursts of data, and thus can be used for different types of physiological signals with different sample rates. The protocol is implemented on the analog devices ADF7020 RF transceivers.
This work proposes wiseMAC(wireless sensor MAC) for the downlink of infrastructure wireless sensor networks. WiseMAC is a novel energy efficient medium access control protocol based on synchronized preamble sampling. The trade-off between power consumption and delay is analyzed, focusing on low traffic. WiseMAC is compared analytically with the power management protocol used in the IEEE 802.15.4 ZigBee standard. It is shown that WiseMAC can provide a significantly lower power consumption for the same delay.
Beat detection algorithms have many clinical applications including pulse oximetry, cardiac arrhythmia detection, and cardiac output monitoring. Most of these algorithms have been developed by medical device companies and are proprietary. Thus, researchers who wish to investigate pulse contour analysis must rely on manual annotations or develop their own algorithms. We designed an automatic detection algorithm for pressure signals that locates the first peak following each heart beat. This is called the percussion peak in intracranial pressure (ICP) signals and the systolic peak in arterial blood pressure (ABP) and pulse oximetry (SpO<sub>2</sub>) signals. The algorithm incorporates a filter bank with variable cutoff frequencies, spectral estimates of the heart rate, rank-order nonlinear filters, and decision logic. We prospectively measured the performance of the algorithm compared to expert annotations of ICP, ABP, and SpO<sub>2</sub> signals acquired from pediatric intensive care unit patients. The algorithm achieved a sensitivity of 99.36% and positive predictivity of 98.43% on a dataset consisting of 42,539 beats.
In this paper, we present an energy-efficient medium access protocol designed for wireless sensor networks. Although the protocol uses TDMA to give nodes in the WSN the opportunity to communicate collision-free, the network is self-organizing in terms of time slot assignment and synchronization. The main goal of the medium access protocol is to minimize overhead of the physical layer. The protocol reduces the number of transceiver state switches and hence the energy wasted in preamble transmissions. The protocol is compared to SMAC and EMACs by simulation. The LMAC protocol is able to extend the network lifetime by a factor 2.4 and 3.8, compared to EMACs and SMAC respectively.
In the newly emerging body area networks (BANs), substantial demands come from both medical applications and consumer electronics (CE) applications. Due to the heterogeneous service requirements, MAC protocol design becomes a new challenge for BANs. To address this problem, a priority-guaranteed MAC protocol is proposed in this paper. In this protocol, data and control channels are split to support collision-free high data rate communication. Application-specific control channels are adopted to provide priority guarantee to the life-critical medical applications. Furthermore, traffic-specific data channels are deployed to improve resource efficiency and latency performance. Monte Carlo simulations are carried out for performance evaluation. Simulation results demonstrate that significant improvements on throughput and energy efficiency are achieved with the priority-guaranteed MAC protocol.
In this paper, a body sensor network (BSN) based context aware QRS detection scheme is proposed. The algorithm uses the context information provided by the body sensor network to improve the QRS detection performance by dynamically selecting the leads with best SNR and taking advantage of the best features of two complementary detection algorithms. The accelerometer data from the BSN are used to classify the patients' daily activity and provide the context information. The classification results indicate both the type of the activities and their corresponding intensity, which is related to the signal/noise ratio of the ECG recordings. Activity intensity is first fed to lead selector to eliminate the leads with low SNR, and then is fed to a selector for selecting a proper QRS detector according to the noise level. MIT-BIH noise stress test database is used to evaluate the algorithms
In this paper, a novel time division multiple access based MAC protocol designed for body sensor networks (BSNs) is presented. H-medium-access control (MAC) aims to improve BSNs energy efficiency by exploiting heartbeat rhythm information, instead of using periodic synchronization beacons, to perform time synchronization. Heartbeat rhythm is inherent in every human body and observable in various biosignals. Biosensors in a BSN can extract the heartbeat rhythm from their own sensory data by detecting waveform peaks. All rhythms represented by peak sequences are naturally synchronized since they are driven by the same source, i.e., the heartbeat. Following the rhythm, biosensors can achieve time synchronization without having to turn on their radio to receive periodic timing information from a central controller, so that energy cost for time synchronization can be completely eliminated and the lifetime of the network can be prolonged. An active synchronization recovery scheme is also developed, including two resynchronization approaches. The algorithms are simulated using the discrete event simulator OMNet ++ with real-world data from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology-Boston's Beth Israel Hospital multiparameter database Multiparameter Intelligent Monitoring for Intensive Care. The results show that H-MAC can prolong the network life dramatically.
IEEE 802.15.4 is a current major technology for low-rate low-power wireless networks. To study the applicability of IEEE 802.15.4 over a wireless body area network (WBAN), in this paper we evaluate its three different access schemes' performance through several metrics. Considering the coexistence of contention access period (CAP) and contention-free period (CFP), we also study the mutual influences of these two traffics. The results show the unslotted mode has better performance than the slotted one in terms of throughput and latency but with the cost of much power consumption. In addition, the guaranteed time slot (GTS) in CFP can not guarantee the successful transmission of the CFP frames without sufficient GTS allocation. Finally, we give the suggestions for the novel medium access control (MAC) design for a WBAN.
Medical body area networks will employ both implantable and bodyworn devices to support a diverse range of applications with throughputs ranging from several bits per hour up to 10 Mbps. The challenge is to accommodate this range of applications within a single wireless network based on a suitably flexible and power efficient medium access control protocol. To this end, we present a Medical Medium Access Control (MedMAC) protocol for energy efficient and adaptable channel access in body area networks. The MedMAC incorporates a novel synchronisation mechanism and initial power efficiency simulations show that the MedMAC protocol outperforms the IEEE 802.15.4 protocol for two classes of medical applications.
This paper presents a novel energy-efficient MAC Protocol designed specifically for wireless body area sensor networks (WBASN) focused towards pervasive healthcare applications. Wireless body area networks consist of wireless sensor nodes attached to the human body to monitor vital signs such as body temperature, activity or heart-rate. The network adopts a master-slave architecture, where the body-worn slave node periodically sends sensor readings to a central master node. Unlike traditional peer-to-peer wireless sensor networks, the nodes in this biomedical WBASN are not deployed in an ad hoc fashion. Joining a network is centrally managed and all communications are single-hop. To reduce energy consumption, all the sensor nodes are in standby or sleep mode until the centrally assigned time slot. Once a node has joined a network, there is no possibility of collision within a cluster as all communication is initiated by the central node and is addressed uniquely to a slave node. To avoid collisions with nearby transmitters, a clear channel assessment algorithm based on standard listen-before-transmit (LBT) is used. To handle time slot overlaps, the novel concept of a wakeup fallback time is introduced. Using single-hop communication and centrally controlled sleep/wakeup times leads to significant energy reductions for this application compared to more ldquoflexiblerdquo network MAC protocols such as 802.11 or Zigbee. As duty cycle is reduced, the overall power consumption approaches the standby power. The protocol is implemented in hardware as part of the Sensiumtrade system-on-chip WBASN ASIC, in a 0.13- mum CMOS process.
Wireless body area networks (WBANs) enable placement of tiny biomedical sensors on or inside the human body to monitor vital body signs. The IEEE 802.15.6 task group is developing a standard to optimize WBAN performance by defining the physical layer (PHY) and media access control (MAC) layer specifications. In this paper an energy efficient MAC protocol (BodyMAC) is proposed. It uses flexible bandwidth allocation to improve node energy efficiency by reducing the possibility of packet collisions and by reducing radio transmission times, idle listening and control packets overhead. BodyMAC is based on a Downlink and Uplink scheme in which the Contention Free Part in the Uplink subframe is completely collision free. Three types of bandwidth allocation mechanisms allow for flexible and efficient data and control communications. An efficient Sleep Mode is introduced to reduce the idle listening duration, especially for low duty cycle nodes in the network. Simulation results show superior performance of BodyMAC compared to that of the IEEE 802.15.4 MAC.
Text detection and recognition in natural images using a single mobile device is becoming relevant due to the increasing interest in Optical Character Recognition (OCR) applications. OCR application on mobile devices is no longer a dream due to the advancement in mobile technology. There are many ongoing researches in this field. Most of the researches focus on the OCR engine of the application and there is not much focus on the processing stage of the OCR application. Pre-processing plays a major role in optimizing the image for character recognition. Thus, in this paper, two pre-processing techniques are proposed for the mobile OCR application. The first technique helps to locate a sign in a natural image efficiently, while the second technique implements Otsu's threshold algorithm to convert images into binary image. These techniques are implemented in an OCR mobile application which is developed using desktop open sources library. After implementation, the OCR application is tested with 50 sign images to verify the accuracy. Experimental results have demonstrated that these techniques can significantly improve the OCR accuracy and decrease the overall computation time.
We propose the cross-layer based battery-aware time division multiple access (TDMA) medium access control (MAC) protocols for wireless body-area monitoring networks in wireless healthcare applications. By taking into account the joint effect of electrochemical properties of the battery, time-varying wireless fading channels, and packet queuing characteristics, our proposed schemes are designed to prolong the battery lifespan of the wireless sensor nodes while guaranteeing the reliable and timely message delivery, which is critically important for the patient monitoring networks. In addition, we develop a Markov chain model to analyze the performance of our proposed schemes. Both the obtained analytical and simulation results show that our proposed schemes can significantly increase the battery lifespan of sensor nodes while satisfying the reliability and delay-bound quality of service (QoS) requirements for wireless body-area monitoring networks. Furthermore, the case study of the electrocardiogram (ECG) monitoring application shows that besides meeting the delay requirements, our proposed schemes outperform the IEEE 802.15.4 and Bluetooth protocols in terms of battery lifespan.
In this paper, a body sensor network (BSN) based context aware QRS detection scheme is proposed. The algorithm uses the context information provided by the body sensor network to improve the QRS detection performance by dynamically selecting the leads with best SNR and taking advantage of the best features of two complementary detection algorithms. The accelerometer data from the BSN are used to classify the patients' daily activity and provide the context information. The classification results indicate both the type of the activities and their corresponding intensity, which is related to the signal/noise ratio of the ECG recordings. Activity intensity is first fed to lead selector to eliminate the leads with low SNR, and then is fed to a selector for selecting a proper QRS detector according to the noise level. MIT-BIH noise stress test database is used to evaluate the algorithms.
This paper proposes S-MAC, a medium-access control (MAC) protocol designed for wireless sensor networks. Wireless sensor networks use battery-operated computing and sensing devices; a network of these devices will collaborate for a common application such as environmental monitoring. We expect sensor networks to be deployed in an ad hoc fashion, with individual nodes remaining largely inactive for long periods of time, but then becoming suddenly active when something is detected. These characteristics of sensor networks and applications motivate a MAC that is different from traditional wireless MACs such as IEEE 802.11 in almost every way: energy conservation and selfconfiguration are a primary goals, while per-node fairness and latency are less important. S-MAC uses three novel techniques to reduce energy consumption and support selfconfiguration. To reduce energy consumption in listening to an idle channel, nodes periodically sleep. Neighboring nodes form virtual clusters to auto-synchronize on sleep schedules. Inspired by PAMAS [10], S-MAC also sets the radio to sleep during transmissions of other nodes. Unlike PAMAS, it only uses in-channel signaling. Finally, S-MAC applies message passing to reduce contention latency for sensor-network applications that require store-and-forward processing as data moves through the network. We evaluate our implementation of S-MAC over a sample sensor node, the Mote, developed at University of California, Berkeley (UCB). The experiment results show that, on a source node, an 802.11-like MAC consumes 2--6 times more energy than S-MAC for traffic load of 1--10s/message. Keywords--- Medium Access Control, Wireless Networks, Sensor Networks I.
A power-efficient MAC protocol for WBAN
- K S Kwak
- S Ullah
- D H Kwak
- C H Lee
- H S Lee
An energy-efficientmac protocol for wireless sensor networks
- ye
A power-efficient MAC protocol for WBAN
- kwak