An efficient multi-channel management protocol for Wireless Body Area Networks

As a successor of WPAN(wireless personal area network) technique for the personal wireless communication, WBAN(wireless body area network) technique with the restricted application range of 3 m of the body area, is being noticed lately. WBAN technique is divided as medical or non-medical according to the use. WBAN has to consider not only 2.4 GHz ISM band but also 400 MHz frequency band for MICS (medical implanted communication service) because medical field is being studied as a representative application of WBAN. MICS operates in the band 402 - 405 MHz, which is a part of the spectrum that has characteristics favourable to the transmission of radio signals into the human body. This includes LBT protocol devised for reducing probability of potential interference between MICS systems or between MICS system and primary system (METAIDS). LBT is able to decrease the probability of interference between MICS systems. However LBT is not suitable for non-collision and emergency communication because it is not able to guarantee a reliable link. In this paper, we propose an efficient way of multi-channel management which reserves the channel by one-to-one mapping between the beacon slot and the data channel. And the channel aggregation makes a single wide channel and satisfies various traffic types. Simulation results show that our proposed scheme significantly improves the throughput and the channel efficiency.