A contention-oriented node sleeping MAC protocol for WBAN

The wireless body area network (WBAN) is a new-type wireless sensor network which has a steep demand for improving energy efficiency and reducing packet delay. However, in a multi-priority environment, the current IEEE Std. 802.15.6 MAC protocol for WBAN may result in excess transmission delay and power consumption due to the selfishness of high-priority sensor nodes. To overcome the deficiency, in this paper, a contention-oriented node sleeping MAC protocol is proposed. The MAC protocol utilizes a contention orientation mechanism between different contention levels to achieve a fair resource allocation. Furthermore, the sleeping scheme of redundant nodes yields energy efficiency. Finally, simulation results show that our proposed protocol outperforms 802.15.6 MAC, AD-MAC as well as DTD-MAC protocols in terms of both packet delay and energy efficiency.