A MAC Protocol for Body Area Networks using Out-of-Band Radio

Abstract

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. Energy consumption and delay are major concern for Medium Access Control (MAC) protocols in a BAN. Low cost wake up radio module attached with sensor devices can help to reduce energy consumption and prolong the network lifetime by reducing idle state energy consumption and increasing sleep time of a BAN node. In this paper, we propose a new MAC protocol for body area network using an out-of-band wake up radio. We have used an on-demand scheduling procedure for communication through a centralized and coordinated external wake up mechanism. We compared our method with some existing MAC protocols and is found to outperform them in terms of energy consumption and delay. Use of wake up radio improved the overall performance of the proposed on-demand MAC.