An Energy-Efficient MAC Protocol for Wireless Wearable Computer Systems

Abstract

Wearable computer systems use the wireless universal serial bus (WUSB), which refers to USB technology that is merged with WiMedia physical layer and medium access control layer (PHY/MAC) technical specifications. WUSB can be applied to wireless personal area network (WPAN) applications as well as wired USB applications such as PAN. WUSB specifications have defined high-speed connections between a WUSB host and WUSB devices for compatibility with USB 2.0 specifications. In this paper, we focus on an integrated system with a WUSB over an IEEE 802.15.6 wireless body area network (WBAN) for wireless wearable computer systems. Due to the portable and wearable nature of wearable computer systems, the WUSB over IEEE 802.15.6 hierarchical medium access control (MAC) protocol has to support power saving operations and integrate WUSB transactions with WBAN traffic efficiently. In this paper, we propose a low-power hibernation technique (LHT) for WUSB over IEEE 802.15.6 hierarchical MAC to improve its energy efficiency. Simulation results show that the LHT also integrates WUSB transactions and WBAN traffic efficiently while it achieves high energy efficiency.