Power efficient wakeup mechanisms for wireless body area networks

The use of wireless sensors in healthcare has given rise to a new field called wireless body area networks (BAN). A sensor node used in a BAN has limited resources in terms of processing power, battery and memory. It is of outmost importance that the use of power is controlled in such a way that these nodes work longer. Media access control (MAC) layer directly involves with the transceiver which is the major source of power use. A common practice in MAC protocols to save power is to let the nodes sleep (switch off major components) whenever there is no need for communication. However, the major difference between them is the way the nodes wakeup to communicate. The wakeup mechanism is critical for network performance metrics such as power efficiency, delay, throughput and lifetime. Suitable wakeup mechanism can significantly improve the performance of MAC protocols for BAN. In this paper, we study the wakeup mechanisms in MAC protocol for BAN.