Design and implementation of a single radio multi-channel MAC protocol on IEEE 802.15.4 for WBAN

Abstract

WBAN(Wireless Body Area Network) which has received a lot of attention for developing medical and entertainment services is standardized by IEEE 802.15 Task Group 6(TG6). WBAN should be guaranteed low data latency because medical data must be timely and correctly transferred. Since the standard considers only a single-channel, it has problems such as intervention and large latency. To solve these problems, a lot of multi-channel TDMA MAC protocols have been proposed. However, multi-radio multichannel MAC protocols cannot be implemented on current off-the-shelf sensor modules because they have a single-radio transceiver. Furthermore, existing single-radio MAC protocols duplicate data, which may lead to energy inefficiency. In this paper, we propose a single-radio multi-channel TDMA MAC protocol which can support low data latency, high reliability, and energy efficiency. To achieve above goals, the proposed protocol employs an inventive topology, i.e., star plus mesh topology. In addition, we implement our protocol on real sensor modules, ZigbeX-I and ZigbeX-II based on IEEE 802.15.4 packet frame and superframe so that we can verify the performance in real environment.