An Energy-Efficient 2R MAC Based on IEEE 802.15.6 for Health Monitoring

Advances in biomedical and wireless technologies have flourished the development of pervasive health monitoring. Wireless Body Area Networks (WBANs) support the interoperability of biomedical sensors, communication network and medical institutions with convenience and high-efficiency, which makes it an appropriate solution for heath monitoring. In this paper, we propose Two Round Reservation MAC (2R MAC) protocol for health monitoring based on IEEE 802.15.6, which is the international standardization specifically designed for WBANs. With analyzing the characteristics of data in health monitoring, 2R MAC discriminates the collected sensor data to periodic data and burst data, conducts two round reservations to raise allocation requests according to the data type. 2R MAC also builds a relationship between the appropriate number of allocation slots and data arrival rate for a specific node to utilize time slots resource efficiently. In addition, in order to guarantee the emergency information can be delivered as soon as possible, 2R MAC determines the transmission order of burst data taking both the user priority and criticality condition into consideration.The simulation results show that 2R MAC achieves higher energy efficiency and longer lifetime compared with IEEE 802.15.6 and One Round Reservation MAC (1R MAC) when heterogenous data flows exist at the same time.