TDMA based MAC protocol for wireless capsule communications

Wireless capsule endoscopy (WCE) is getting more and more popular in recent years. Compared with the traditional push endoscopy, it gives patients little discomfort. Researchers are focusing on providing many advanced functionalities such as active locomotion, drug delivery. it can also imagined that more than one capsules are swallowed by patients and these capsules co-work to finish some common task. The capsules and data recorder form a wireless capsule network. This multiple capsule networks have some unique attributes which are different from wireless sensor networks and body sensor networks. A novel TDMA based asymmetric topology MAC protocol is proposed. The uplink and downlink data communications follow different topology. By this way the energy consumption can be reduced. The TDMA frame format is proposed. Simulation results using Qualnet 5.0 show that the proposed protocol outperforms star topology TDMA in terms of energy consumption.