Ranjeet Kumar Patro

Emergency handling in MICS based Body Area Network

Body Area Network, a new wireless networking paradigm, promises to revolutionize the healthcare applications. A number of tiny sensor nodes are strategically placed in and around the human body to obtain physiological information. The sensor nodes are connected to a coordinator or a data collector to form a Body Area Network. The tiny devices may sense physiological parameters of emergency in nature (e.g. abnormality in heart bit rate, increase of glucose level above the threshold etc.) that needs immediate attention of a physician. Due to ultra low power requirement of wireless body area network, most of the time, the coordinator and devices are expected to be in the dormant mode, categorically when network is not operational. This leads to an open question, how to handle and meet the QoS requirement of emergency data when network is not operational? Emergency handling becomes more challenging at the MAC layer, if the channel access related information is unknown to the device with emergency message. The aforementioned scenarios are very likely scenarios in a MICS (Medical Implant Communication Service, 402-405 MHz) based healthcare systems. This paper proposes a mechanism for timely and reliable transfer of emergency data in a MICS based Body Area Network. We validate our protocol design with simulation in a C++ framework. Our simulation results show that more than 99 percentage of the time emergency messages are reached at the coordinator with a delay of 400ms.

A Delay and Energy Efficient Poll-Based MAC Protocol for Wireless Body Area Networks

Abstract A number of tiny sensor nodes are strategically placed in and around the human body to obtain physiological information. The sensor nodes are connected to a coordinator or a data collector to form a wireless body area network (WBAN). WBAN consists of variety of medical and non-medical applications with aggregate data rate requirement ranging from few bytes per second to 10 Mbps. These applications are having relatively different energy saving, reliability and quality of service (QoS) requirements. For example, emergency medical data are highly erratic but should be transferred with high reliability and minimum delay, whereas electrocardiogram and electroencephalogram applications are constant bit rate traffic which need to be transferred with moderate reliability. Additionally, non-medical applications include variable bit rate traffic and their jitter and delay requirements must also be met. On the above, a sensor node should spend minimum energy and conserve power to increase its life time in the network. The existing media access control (MAC) protocols present in various short and medium range wireless technologies such as 802.11 and 802.15.4 have been designed for specific purposes, and therefore, do not fulfill the diverse performance requirements across all WBAN applications. In this paper, we propose a poll-based MAC protocol, PMAC for WBAN, which can meet such diversified functional requirements of various WBAN applications. In particular, we introduce few concepts in polling based channel access mechanism to make an energy efficient and QoS aware MAC protocol. The design has been validated by obtaining the performance of proposed PMAC protocol through simulation.

PMAC: A poll-based MAC protocol for wireless body area networks (WBANs)

A number of tiny sensor nodes are strategically placed in and around the human body to obtain physiological information. The sensor nodes are connected to a coordinator or a data collector to form a WBAN. WBAN consists of variety of medical and non-medical applications with aggregate data rate requirement ranging from few bytes per second to 10Mbps. These applications are having relatively different energy saving, reliability and quality of service (QoS) requirements. The existing MAC protocols present in various short and medium range wireless technologies such as 802.11 and 802.15.4 have been designed for specific purposes, and therefore, do not fulfill the diverse performance requirements across all WBAN applications. In this paper, we propose a poll-based MAC protocol (PMAC) for WBAN, which can meet such a diversified functional requirements of various WBAN applications. In particular, we introduce few concepts in polling based channel access mechanism to make an energy efficient and QoS aware MAC protocol. The design has been validated by obtaining the performance of proposed PMAC protocol through simulation.