A power efficient pulsed MAC protocol for Body Area Networks

The need for a reduction in healthcare cost has escalated over the past decade. Therefore, preventive medicine through remote health monitoring and Body Area Networks has gained more attention. In this paper a novel Medium Access Control (MAC) protocol, called Pulsed-MAC or simply PMAC, is introduced to efficiently manage wireless communications in Body Area Networks. PMAC notably extends the network life time by augmenting sensor nodes with charge pumping circuitry which harvest energy from a pulsed signal used to wake up the nodes. By measuring the average radio power consumption in a sensor node over a 24 hour simulation period, results show that PMAC outperforms conventional SMAC by up to three times and will easily allow for a Body Area Network to last beyond 200 days.