On energy-delay efficiency for WBAN: A multi-channel scheme

Along with the increase of people´s urge for health care, e-health, as a term for healthcare practice supported by electronic processes and communication, attracts more and more attentions. Wireless Body Area Network (WBAN) built on IEEE 802.15.6 is an excellent solution for e-health on account of its medical applications. Extensive researches of the Medium Access Control (MAC) protocol in WBAN put emphasis on single channel. This may result in inevitable interference and bring channel collision and energy inefficiency. In addition, traditional Carrier Sense Multiple Access with Collision Avoidance (CS-MA/CA) utilized in single channel results in the large packet delay and energy consumption for overhearing. This cannot meet the request of medical data communication. To address these issues, we propose an energy-delay efficient multi-channel MAC (ED-MAC) protocol. In our scheme, (i) the channels are classified into control channel and data ones; (ii) nodes contend to reserve data channels in control channel while transmit data frames through the specified data channels; (iii) the value of Contention Window (CW) in CSMA/CA is adjusted to accommodate the ED-MAC protocol better. Simulation results show that our ED-MAC scheme significantly decreases the packet delay and improves the throughput, channel utilization and energy efficiency.