Experimental characterization of Low Power Listening in BAN

This paper presents an implementation of a Low Power Listening-based (LPL) Medium Access Control (MAC) protocol on a platform for Body Area Network (BAN) applications. LPL exploits the transmission of a burst of short packets, called preambles, to synchronize the transmitter and the receiver. In this way, devices are able to spend most of the time in sleeping mode, providing longer lifetime and energy saving. Experiments on the field have been conducted by considering different scenarios and results, in terms of average energy consumed per packet, packet loss rate and average delay, have been investigated. Conclusions regarding the proper parameters setting depending on the application requirements were derived. This work has been performed in the framework of the FP7 Integrated Project, WiserBAN.