Multi-channel broadcast in asymmetric duty cycling wireless body area networks

We formulate and study a broadcast problem arising in multi-channel duty cycling wireless body area networks (WBANs), where the sink needs to broadcast the control message to all sensor nodes. The objective is to design robust multichannel wake-up schedule with minimum worst-case broadcast delay while guaranteeing the full broadcast diversity regardless of clock drifts and asymmetric duty cycles. To that end, we first derive the lower-bound of worst-case broadcast delay with full diversity of any broadcast protocol and then design a multichannel broadcast protocol (MCB) that satisfies the performance requirement for the latency and diversity. Finally, the simulation results demonstrate the capability of MCB of ensuring successful broadcast delivery on every channel within the theoretical worst-case broadcast delay, even under asymmetric duty cycles and any amount of clock drifts.