A study on ultra low power MAC protocols over Wireless Body Area Network

Due to specific requirements of a Wireless Body Area Network (WBAN), existing protocols such as IEEE 802.15.4 (Wireless Personal Area Network), Bluetooth, and IEEE 802.11 (Wireless Local Area Network) cannot address all the needs of a WBAN. Recently, a lot of medium access control (MAC) protocols have been proposed to address the requirements of a WBAN. In this paper, a comprehensive survey of recent MAC protocols for WBAN has been presented. Most of the WBAN MAC protocols are based on IEEE 802.15.4 MAC superframe structure. However, each MAC protocol for WBAN has some improvements and adjustments upon IEEE 802.15.4 MAC, to address the stringent issues of WBAN effectively. All the significant changes and improvements in each MAC protocol have been highlighted in this paper. As a conclusion, we outline all the novel features that make these MAC protocols meet the quality of service (QoS) and power efficiency requirements of a WBAN scenario. A number of key research issues have been put forward with regard to prospects of MAC design and selection for WBAN network.