Light-weight history-based Medium Access Control (MAC) protocol for body area networks

Abstract

Different MAC techniques in body area networks (BAN) are to make different tradeoffs to suit for the variety of situations that may be caused by the heterogeneous traffic behavior of the BANs. Previously, we proposed a dynamic delayed MAC scheme with a fuzzy technique to add a traffic adaptive quality to the existing IEEE 802.15.4 which addresses traffic diversity in BAN applications. In this paper we investigate reducing the complexity of our previous method by integrating it with a caching technique enabling the MAC algorithm to minimize the iterations of running the fuzzy engine. We examine the efficiency of the previously fuzzy-based MAC algorithm in terms of energy to be implemented on real SHIMMER sensor platforms by evaluating the reliability and battery lifetime.