Configurable MAC layer access modes for challenging environments in body area networks

Designing ultra low power MAC protocols for wireless body area sensor networks has been one of the interesting challenges due its unique channel characteristics and high reliability requirements. The recently published IEEE 802.15.6 standard offers a flexible superframe structure that can be adjusted by the hub to suit the communication requirements of the network and applications. However, the standard leaves the higher level questions open such as: should we use contention-based, scheduled, or improvised access, and under what conditions should we use them? Any MAC protocol that is looking to exploit these access modes should have a clear understanding of their parameters and operating characteristics. In this paper, we present a classifier-based configurable MAC modes for different healthcare applications and evaluate their performance. We considered a challenging scenario of a BAN with heterogenous nodes walking in a high interference environment and quantitatively compared the performance with contention-based and scheduled access modes. The simulation performance evaluation is carried out in OMNET++ with CASTALIA simulator framework. The performance improvements in configurable access mode offers key insights that could be translated to concrete design suggestions to build more efficient MAC protocols.