Very-high-throughput millimeter-wave system oriented for health monitoring applications

Millimeter-wave transmission systems allow for very high throughput rates and broad bandwidths using wireless technology. Most Body Area Networks (BANs) work in the high MHz or few GHz range, which limit the channel capacity of the system. If the bandwidth is narrow, only low spectrally-efficient modulation techniques can be utilized. In this study an energy-efficient radio-over-fiber media access control protocol using the unlicensed 60-GHz millimeter-wave (mm-wave) band is proposed. The protocol can be best described as an algorithm that generates an isometric distribution of the available frequency-time resources and services the slave motes in monochromatic groups. The master mote builds a frequency-time two-dimensional grid that organizes the chronological service order of this FD-TDMA hybrid protocol. This mechanism provides a collision-free environment in which the sensors can achieve energy independence, also referred as self-sustainability in this work, which is an important feature in BANs. Results show that the proposed protocol successfully manages the BANs in a collision-free and energy self-sustainable manner.