Performance study of the enhancement schemes for Baseline MAC of Body Area networks

Wireless Body Area networks (WBANs) aim at supporting a variety of health care applications with different quality of service (QoS) requirements under dynamic wireless channel conditions. Furthermore, there are many design constraints on the sensor nodes [1]. Therefore, it is very challenging to design MAC protocols for WBANs to offer scheduling flexibility, high reliability, energy efficiency and others [1], [2]. In this paper we propose the enhancement schemes, such as overflow-aware adaptive polling and node-initiated link adaptation, for Baseline MAC to improve the packet reception ratio (PRR) in the critical scenarios with high traffic demand and deep fading. The simulation results through extensive simulations in Castalia show that compared with Baseline MAC and dynamic interleaving, the combined enhancement scheme can significantly improve PRR under different traffic profiles and channel conditions in WBANs.