Achieving energy efficiency in Body Area Networks (BAN's) through avoiding spatially correlated contention

Energy Efficiency has been categorized as one of the major challenges for Body Area Networks (BAN) due to the limited power supply and expected long life of nodes and networks. This work proposes to reduce the energy consumption of BAN through monitoring and eliminating the spatial correlated contention in the BAN nodes. The issues of spatial correlation contention have been studied for traditional WSN's, but not in the BAN's. Since there could be cases in the BAN where multiple nodes make attempt to transmit the same data, the contention may take place resulting in the collisions and retransmissions. Avoiding this contention shall help prolonging the node and network lifetime. Two approaches have been proposed to solve the issue of correlation contention: only master transmitting the unique data and all the sensor nodes transmitting the unique data when compared with that of the neighbors. Simulations have been performed to observe the difference in energy consumption for both the proposed cases. It was found that the energy consumption for BAN comes out to be better when all the sensor nodes monitor the neighbor traffic and send the unique data only avoiding the redundant transmissions; hence the contention and collision reduces. The proposed approach can be integrated with any established MAC protocol for BAN in order to optimize the energy performance.