Multi-dimensional traffic adaptive energy-efficient MAC protocol for Wireless Body Area Networks

In recent days, Wireless Body Area Networks (WBANs) comprising with different bio-sensors (e.g., EEG, EMG, and ECG etc.) has been getting popular for observing human health condition and various medical applications. Since, biosensors are battery-operated and deployed on human-body for long-term use, frequent sensor replacement is troublesome and complex task. Hence, it is important to design energy-efficient protocols especially Medium Access Control (MAC) protocol for WBANs. As of now, majority of WBAN MAC protocols are designed considering either application traffic class or a few are based on traffic load. However, in this paper we have argued that for energy-efficient WBAN MAC design both the traffic class and load should be taken into account; hence, necessity of a complete MAC solution for Multi-Dimensional Traffic (i.e., consideration of both traffic class and load) is worthy for WBAN. In this paper we propose MDTA-MAC protocol which is designed with multidimensional traffic, where to increase the network performance the duty cycle and super-frame format of IEEE 802.15.6 standard are used. As a result, multi-dimensional traffic awareness of our proposed work helps to minimize the energy cost and delay. Simulation result shows that the proposed MAC protocol significantly outperforms the existing works in term of energy consumption and delay.