HACMAC: A reliable human activity-based medium access control for implantable body sensor networks

Abstract

Chronic care is an eminent application of implantable body sensor networks (IBSN). Performing physical activities such as walking, running, and sitting is unavoidable during the long-term monitoring of chronic-care patients. These physical activities cripple the radio frequency (RF) signal between the implanted sensor nodes. This is because various body postures shadow the RF signal. Although shadowing itself may be short, a prolonged activity will significantly increase the effect of the RF-shadowing. This effect dampens the communication between implantable sensor nodes and hence increases the chance of missing life-critical data. To overcome this problem, in this paper we propose a link quality-aware medium access control (MAC) protocol called HACMAC, which adapts the access mechanism during different human activities based on the wireless link-quality. Our simulation results show that compared with the access mechanism suggested by the IEEE 802.15.6 standard, the reliability of the wireless communication is increased using HACMAC even while transmitting at a strongly low transmission power of 25μW effective isotropic radiated power (EIRP) set by the IEEE 802.15.6 standard.