A context aware MAC protocol for medical Wireless Body Area Network

During long-term medical monitoring in Wireless Body Area Networks (WBAN), network requirements (i.e. traffic loads and latency) of various data sources may be different at different time. High traffic loads may lead to data overload and unacceptable latency, which makes potential danger of patients undiagnosed. It is important that real-time transmission of life-critical data can be always guaranteed. To address this problem, a context-aware MAC protocol is presented in this paper. According to analysis of collected life parameters, the protocol can switch between normal state and emergency state. As a result, data rate and duty cycle of sensor nodes are dynamically changed to meet the requirement of latency and traffic loads in a contexta-ware way. To save the power consumption, a TDMA-based MAC frame structure is used. Moreover, a novel optional synchronization scheme is proposed to decrease the overhead caused by traditional TDMA synchronization scheme. Simulation results show significant improvements of our design on latency and power consumption.