A Flexible Enhanced Throughput and Reduced Overhead (FETRO) MAC Protocol for ETSI SmartBAN

Smart body area networks (SmartBAN) is an emerging wireless body area networks (WBAN) standard proposed by the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI). This paper first examines the potential of SmartBAN medium access control (MAC) layer with scheduled access to support a myriad of WBAN applications, having diverse data rate requirements. Extra scheduled access slots can be allocated to high date rate sensor nodes for managing their data rate requirements. High data rate sensor nodes can also be re-assigned to use the available time slots of low data rate sensor nodes in Inter-Beacon Interval (IBI) by the central hub. But these two schemes incorporate different physical (PHY) and MAC layer overheads related to frame transmission, frame acknowledgement and slot re-assignment. This redundant overhead transmission results in high overhead energy consumption and reduced effective throughput. Therefore, an innovative and flexible enhanced throughput and reduced overhead (FETRO) MAC protocol for scheduled access is proposed in this article. In the proposed scheme, the sensor node data rate requirements are considered while assigning the scheduled access slot duration by allowing minimal changes in the base-line standard implementation. This infers the provision of scheduled access slots with variable slot durations within an IBI. We also evaluate the existing techniques of extra slot allocation and slot re-assignment in SmartBAN as well as the proposed FETRO MAC protocol with variable slot length. The proposed FETRO MAC scheme results in optimizing both the overall throughput and normalized overhead energy consumption per kilo bits per second (Kbps). Additionally, the impact of various WBAN channel models over these throughput management approaches is also investigated. The proposed FETRO MAC protocol with variable slot duration gives an average reduction of 65.5 and 59.16 percent, respectively, in the hub and nodes normalized overhead energy consumption per Kbps outcomes, as compared to the de-facto SmartBAN MAC scheduling strategies.