A discrete time polling protocol for Wireless Body Area Network

Wireless Body Area Networks (WBANs) can use different types of medium accesses namely CSMA, scheduled, polling, or a combination of these techniques. These access methods are specified in IEEE 802.15.6 standard for WBAN. Most of the studies done so far on medium access methods in WBAN have been related to CSMA and scheduled access. Polling is also specified in the standard as a medium access method with the method of implementation left to the user. In this paper, a discrete time polling access method for WBAN is given and the performance of the protocol is studied for certain categories of medical applications. Polling as a media access method is advantageous in the case of intermittent data in comparison to continuous data. It is shown that lifetimes of medical devices depend on the data rates of the application and the polling scheme used where an adaptive sleep schedule is employed. Simulations are done to study the behaviour of the protocol with respect to important QoS parameters like data rate and latency requirements of the application.