Energy-Efficient TDMA-Based MAC Protocol for Wireless Body Area Networks

Body area networks (BAN) are a specific type of network structure. They are spread over a very small area and their available power is heavily constrained. Hence it is useful to have gateway points in the network, such as nodes carried around the belt, that are less power constrained and can be used for network coordination. This network structure can result in very low transmission power/range for the sensors and effective TDMA timing control. This paper presents an energy-efficient MAC protocol for communication within the wireless body area network. The protocol takes advantage of the fixed nature of the body area network to implement a TDMA strategy with very little communication overhead, long sleep times for the sensor transceivers and robustness to communication errors. The protocol is implemented on the analog devices ADF7020 RF transceivers.