iA-MAC: Improved Adaptive Medium Access Control protocol for Wireless Body Area Networks

This paper presents improved Adaptive Medium Access Control (iA-MAC) protocol for Wireless Body Area Networks (WBANs). In addition to the adaptive guard band assignment technique, the newly proposed protocol has an improved as well as adaptive sleep/wakeup mechanism. We consider a simple temperature measuring application, where sensors (nodes) sense human body for updated information. If the current readings are within normal range, nodes stay in idle state (do not access channel). On the other hand, if the current sensed information is within high range then nodes switch to active state and access the channel because critical information needs to be transmitted as soon as possible. Besides the normal and high ranges of temperature, if the current sensed temperature lies with pre-high range then nodes access for channel if and only if the current sensed data is not duplicated version of the previously sensed data. Moreover, iA-MAC uses well defined synchronization mechanism to avoid collisions between data as well as control packets. Simulation results show that performance of the newly proposed iA-MAC protocol is better than its existing counter part protocols in terms of the selected performance metrics.