The Design and Software Implementation of a MAC Protocol for Body-Coupled Communication Systems

Body-coupled communication (BCC) is a technology that is based on the use of capacitively-coupled electric fields over the human body. In this paper we highlight the design and implementation of a medium access control (MAC) protocol specifically designed to meet the requirements of BCC-enabled body area networks (BANs). We propose a set of specific protocol enhancements over well-known MAC protocols that are based on the concept of low-power listening. We present the proposed protocol in conjunction with the embedded software implementation for the prototype hardware platform. The purpose of this approach is to demonstrate that several protocol enhancements were motivated by observations on the actual BCC hardware and its intricacies. Finally, we present a series of experiments under real conditions.