Energy harvesting aware hybrid MAC protocol for WBANs

Abstract

In this paper, we propose a hybrid polling Medium Access Control (MAC) protocol with Human Energy Harvesting capabilities, called HEH-BMAC, designed for Wireless Body Area Networks (WBANs). The proposed protocol uses a dynamic schedule algorithm to combine User Identification polling (ID) and Probabilistic Contention (PC) random access, adapting the network operation to the random, time-varying nature of the human energy harvesting sources. HEH-BMAC offers different levels of node priorities (high and normal), energy-awareness and flexibility. Extensive simulations have been conducted in order to evaluate the energy efficiency and throughput of our scheme compared to IEEE 802.15.6 standard in energy harvesting conditions.