MEDIUM ACCESS CONTROL PROTOCOL FOR WIRELESS BODY AREA NETWORKS EFFICIENT AND RELIABLE DESIGN

With the increasing popularity of wireless networks due to its convenience, ease of use, configuration and shrinking of electronic devices in the modern generation, researchers have been encouraged to develop a keen interest in the area of Wireless Body Area Networks (WBANs) which had been neglected for a long time but its growth in e Health and entertainment services in recent years has been steady. In the developing and implementation of Wireless Body Area Networks a lot of challenges have been face over the years. However, one of the key challenges which has stood out is in the developing of devices which are not only effective but also efficient in terms of power consumption which is key to any wireless devices. Specifically, there are two crucial challenges for WBAN, the first one is the tracking and maintaining of Quality of Service (QoS), i.e. the delivery probability and latency is not assured under the dynamic nature of human beings mobility and the second important issue is to ensure the energy efficiency within such a resource-constrained network. In this project, a new medium access control (MAC) protocol is proposed to tackle the above mentioned challenges. We adopt a Time Division Multiple Access (TDMA)-based protocol and dynamically adjust the transmission order and transmission duration of the nodes based on channel status and application context of WBAN. Designing a MAC layer protocols for WBANs which is reliable and efficient in terms of energy is the ultimate goal since MAC layer controls the radio activity; consequently, it is compulsory to aim at an energy efficient MAC protocol.