Performance analysis on T-MAC protocol over a body area network

This paper propose an energy efficient analysis on MAC (Medium Access Control) protocols for a wireless body sensor network. WSN (Wireless Sensor Network) have usually battery-operated computing and sensing devices. A network of these devices will collaborate into a common application such as environmental or heath monitoring. Deploying such network in an ad hoc configuration implies that some individual nodes remain inactive for long periods of time, but becoming suddenly active at event detection. These characteristics of sensor networks and applications motivate a MAC analysis, for evaluating the energy conservation and throughput capabilities as primary goals, while per-node fairness and latency are less important. Nodes are periodically put in a sleep state, to reduce energy consumption when listening to an idle channel. We evaluate MAC protocol performances over a sample body area network.