Description

Rapid growth in biomedical sensors, low power circuits and wireless communications has enabled a new generation of Wireless Sensor Networks, the Body Area Networks (BANs) to serve a variety of applications, mainly dedicated for health care monitoring applications by providing freedom of movement for patients. As a BAN is capable of generating large quantities of real-time data, the potential for information overload is very high. A body area network (BAN) is a network of body worn or implanted electronic devices, including wireless sensors which can monitor body parameters or to detect movements. One of the big challenges in BANs is the propagation channel modeling. Channel models can be used to understand wave propagation in and around the human body. The proposed MAC protocol can adapt to the time-varying channel and traffic of WBAN by dynamically optimizing the transmission schedule, i.e., transmission order and transmission duration, of each sensor node. The body-to-body channel is important due to the anticipated prevalence of body area networks, where this interfering channel, with multiple co-located BANs, can dominate the on-body radio channel. It will be shown that there are various difficulties in channel modeling for BAN, which are particular to the BAN channel, underlining the importance of BAN reliability and life-time enhancing system design, such as relay-assisted communications, transmit power control and link adaptation. We evaluate the QoS and energy of the pro-posed MAC protocol and therein validate the designs and analysis by extensive simulations.