A New Priority-Guaranteed MAC Protocol for Emerging Body Area Networks

In the newly emerging body area networks (BANs), substantial demands come from both medical applications and consumer electronics (CE) applications. Due to the heterogeneous service requirements, MAC protocol design becomes a new challenge for BANs. To address this problem, a priority-guaranteed MAC protocol is proposed in this paper. In this protocol, data and control channels are split to support collision-free high data rate communication. Application-specific control channels are adopted to provide priority guarantee to the life-critical medical applications. Furthermore, traffic-specific data channels are deployed to improve resource efficiency and latency performance. Monte Carlo simulations are carried out for performance evaluation. Simulation results demonstrate that significant improvements on throughput and energy efficiency are achieved with the priority-guaranteed MAC protocol.