An Adaptive MAC Protocol Based on IEEE802.15.6 for Wireless Body Area Networks

Abstract

The application carrier of wireless body area network (WBAN) is human; due to changes in people’s sports status or physical health and other reasons, the business traffic fluctuates greatly, which requires the network to have good adaptability. In addition, the energy consumption problem is also a key factor restricting the applications of the WBAN. At present, the proposed MAC protocol is not highly adaptive and has low energy efficiency. To solve this problem, this paper proposes an adaptive MAC protocol based on IEEE802.15.6 for WBAN (A-MAC). The protocol sets the data to three priorities according to the type of service; the superframe structure of IEEE802.15.6 is improved and reorganized into four phases: the beacon phase, the contention access phase, the noncontention access phase, and the inactive phase. The length of the contention access phase and the noncontention access phase is adjusted according to the proportion of nodes that generate each priority data. The contention access phase is further divided into three subphases, and the length of the subphase is dynamically adjusted according to the data priority. In the contention access phase, all nodes compete for access channel according to the channel access policy. The random data that competes successfully transmits data directly, and the periodic data that competes successfully transmits data in the allocated time slots of the noncontention access phase. Finally through the simulation of the proposed A-MAC protocol and IEEE 802.15.6 MAC protocol and CA-MAC protocol in network performance which were compared, the results show that in terms of throughput, power consumption, and the network time delay, the network performance using A-mac protocol is better than the network performance using IEEE802.15.6 MAC and CA-MAC protocols.