Energy efficient advertisement protocol for cooperative body area networks

One of the current issues on using Wearable Networks is their low-level interoperability among different Body Area Networks (BAN) especially when the Telecom infrastructure is unavailable. Based on an architecture opening BAN to cooperative Body-to-Body Networks, we have proposed an energy efficient advertisement protocol for BAN discovery and friendship establishment. On the one hand, the proposed pseudo-random approach allows the MAC layer to pseudo-randomly schedule the communications and to save energy. On the other hand, bringing security based approach directly into the access allows only selected friends to predict when next MAC communication attempts will occur. We have evaluated the performance of the proposed Advertisement MAC scheme through an accurate and realistic WSNet-based simulator based on link correlated and time-varying propagation models (i.e. with consistent mobility patterns) for On-Body and Body-to-Body communications. Then we have compared with different state of the art MAC strategies (Random periodic transmission, scheduled rendez-vous, unslotted CSMA/CA) with/without periodic scanning. We show that the proposed solution provides an excellent trade off between the energy consumption and the average packet delivery ratio.