On Energy-Saving in E-Healthcare: A Directional MAC Protocol for WBAN

Progress in Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) has prospered the evolutions of ubiquitous E-healthcare. Wireless Body Area Networks (WBANs) provide real-time and reliable health monitoring which is crucial in E-healthcare beyond conventional boundaries especially in geographical sense, owing to the human-centered and sensor interoperability properties. However, the development of WBAN is confined to energy constraint of sensor nodes. In this paper, we propose an Energy-efficient Directional Approach Medium Access Control (EDA-MAC) protocol based on IEEE 802.15.6 scheduled access mechanism to reduce energy consumption prolonging network lifetime. The EDA-MAC protocol distinguishes the traffic varieties and allocates the transmission order in the light of user priorities designated. Besides, EDA-MAC employs multi-beam and single-beam directional mode for periodic and burst data reservation respectively, while data transmission is always in single-beam mode. Furthermore, both analytical and emulational evaluations are conducted in unsaturated and saturated network traffic condition. The simulation instances show that EDA-MAC consumes less energy while its throughput is better than IEEE 802.15.6 in the same condition.