Comparative Analysis of MAC Protocols in a Mobility Aware Wireless Body Area Network

Application areas of wireless body area networks (WBANs) are growing in our everyday lives and the main area being the medical field. WBANs are made up of small sensor nodes that monitor activities on the human body and send data to appropriate places. These sensors require energy and they are normally powered by small batteries. It is of utmost importance to make sure that the battery life of these sensors is conserved as much as possible as well as reliability of the network should be as high as possible. In this paper, media access control (MAC) protocols used for communication by the sensor nodes are analyzed using Castalia simulator based on the OMNET++ framework. A network consisting of 5 nodes is set up and mobility is configured on the suitable nodes, packets are then transmitted to the sink node. The IEEE 802.15.4, IEE802.15.6 and TMAC protocols are then used for media access and parameters such as battery usage, reliability, lifetime and latency of the network are observed as simulations are being carried out. It's observed that no protocol has all the desired properties such as high reliability and lower battery usage.