Low Power Mac Protocol in Wban for E-Heath Application

Abstract

The work described in this paper describes about the design of a low power (medium access control) MAC protocol for in-body implant network. It addresses a unique set of requirements for the implant network unlike generic (body area networks) BAN protocols. By choosing a Fitness monitoring application a patient, it has been demonstrated how to exploit disparities inherent in a typical implanted BAN to enable low power operation. A new MAC scheme is being presented here for low power operation by handling the nodes in accordance to power and latency requirements. It also presents a new scheme analytically for deriving the power-optimised (time division multiple access) TDMA frame parameter like beacon interval and life time of a device. Duty-cycle efficiency and the packet error rate are calculated for the in-body wireless channel. Simulation results show that the proposed MAC protocol outperforms best of reported MACs and for low data rate sensors in terms of power consumption.

Keywords — BAN, biomedical implants, duty cycle, MAC layer, power optimization