PMAC: A poll-based MAC protocol for wireless body area networks (WBANs)

A number of tiny sensor nodes are strategically placed in and around the human body to obtain physiological information. The sensor nodes are connected to a coordinator or a data collector to form a WBAN. WBAN consists of variety of medical and non-medical applications with aggregate data rate requirement ranging from few bytes per second to 10Mbps. These applications are having relatively different energy saving, reliability and quality of service (QoS) requirements. The existing MAC protocols present in various short and medium range wireless technologies such as 802.11 and 802.15.4 have been designed for specific purposes, and therefore, do not fulfill the diverse performance requirements across all WBAN applications. In this paper, we propose a poll-based MAC protocol (PMAC) for WBAN, which can meet such a diversified functional requirements of various WBAN applications. In particular, we introduce few concepts in polling based channel access mechanism to make an energy efficient and QoS aware MAC protocol. The design has been validated by obtaining the performance of proposed PMAC protocol through simulation.