Authors : T. Umamaheswari and Sheila Anand
Abstract: Wireless Body Area Network (WBAN) promises a new healthcare system through allowing inexpensive, unobtrusive and non-invasive monitoring of human’s health-status. WBAN comprises of tiny, lightweight, low-cost, intelligent wireless sensor devices which are placed on key points of the human body and connected by means of a wireless network. The vital physiological body parameters are sensed and sent to remote servers for health care monitoring. WBAN can be connected to the remote server by a range of telecommunication network such as WLAN, Wi-Fi or a dedicated hospital network. Efficient MAC protocols are required to meet the major requirements of low power consumptions and energy efficiency of the sensors. The MAC protocol typically needs to address two issues: channel assignment to decide which channels are to be used by which hosts and medium access to resolve the contention problem. This study analyzes the existing MAC protocols for WBAN on different perspectives such as throughput, delay and power. IEEE 802.15.6 the new standard for WBAN has also been discussed.
T. Umamaheswari and Sheila Anand, 2013. A Comprehensive Review of Medium Access Control Protocols for WBAN. Asian Journal of Information Technology, 12: 273-285.