Abstract
The human body communication (HBC) is a technology that enables short range data communication using the human body as a medium, like an electrical wire. Thus it removes the need for a traditional antenna. HBC may be used as a type of data communication in body area network (BAN), while the devices are being in contact with body. One of important issues in BAN is an emergency alarm because it may be closely related to human life. For emergency data communication, the most critical factor is the time constraint. IEEE 802.15.6 specifies that the emergency alarm for the BAN must be notified in less than 1 sec and must provide prioritization mechanisms for emergency traffic and notification. As one type of BAN, the HBC must follow this recommendation, too. Existing emergency handling methods in BAN are based on the carrier sensing capability on radio frequencies to detect the status of channels. However, PHY protocol in HBC does not provide the carrier sensing. So the previous methods are not well suitable for HBC directly. Additionally, in the environment that the emergency rate is very low, the allocation of dedicated slot(s) for emergency in each superframe is very wasteful. In this work, we proposed specific emergency handling operation for human body communication's medium access control (HBC-MAC) protocol to meet the emergency requirements for BAN. We also showed the optimal number of emergency slots for the various combinations of beacon intervals and emergency rates.
Highlights
The IEEE 802.15 Task Group 6 (BAN Group) is developing a communication standard optimized for low power devices operating on, in, or around the human body
The priority access period (PAP) is comprised of priority time slot (PTS) which is a physical time period immediately after the beacon, and embedded PAP, which are the unoccupied slots in both contention access period (CAP) and contention free period (CFP)
We propose how many emergency guaranteed time slot (EGTS) slots are necessary in various conditions of beacon interval (BI) time and emergency occurrence rates
Summary
The IEEE 802.15 Task Group 6 (BAN Group) is developing a communication standard optimized for low power devices operating on, in, or around the human body (but not limited to humans). HBC provides these features by utilizing frequency selective digital transmission (FSDT), a type of direct digital signaling Because it does not require analog modulation, the transmitted data can be reached in the receiver using simple signal processing: amplifying, filtering, and comparing with a reference signal. Other proposals for the emergency handling are basically based on the CSMA/CA mechanism in BAN Their medium is radio signal whose frequencies might be 400 M or 2.4 GHz and network range is purposed to be up to 5 meters.
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