Study of medium access mechanisms under IEEE 802.15.6 standard

Wireless body area network (WBAN) is paving the way for the deployment of a variety of medical and non-medical applications. This class of networks has emerged in the recent years and much of the research in the area of body area networks has focused on issues related to ultra low-power processing and communication, lightweight wireless sensor nodes in order to control the human body functions and healthcare monitoring systems. The task Group 6 of IEEE 802.15.6 is formed to address specific needs of body area networks. It defines a medium access protocol control (MAC) layer that supports three physical layers namely NarrowBand (NB), Ultra WideBand (UWB), and Human Body Communications (HBC) layers. In this paper, we present major MAC requirements of WBAN, we overview various proposed MAC protocols for WBAN and we highlight the MAC protocol concepts of IEEE 802.15.6.