Abstract
Intra-body Communication (IBC) is a communication method using the human body as a communication medium, in which body-attached devices exchange electro-magnetic (EM) wave signals with each other. The fact that our human body consists of water and electrolytes allows such communication methods to be possible. Such a communication technology can be used to design novel body area networks that are secure and resilient towards external radio interference. While being an attractive technology for enabling new applications for human body-centered ubiquitous applications, network protocols for IBC systems is yet under-explored. The IEEE 802.15.6 standards present physical and medium access control (MAC) layer protocols for IBC, but, due to many simplifications, we find that its MAC protocol is limited in providing an environment to enable high data rate applications. This work, based on empirical EM wave propagation measurements made for the human body communication channel, presents IB-MAC, a centralized Time-division multiple access (TDMA) protocol that takes in consideration the transmission latency the body channel induces. Our results, in which we use an event-based simulator to compare the performance of IB-MAC with two different IEEE 802.15.6 standard-compliant MAC protocols and a state-of-the art TDMA-based MAC protocol for IBC, suggest that IB-MAC is suitable for supporting high data rate applications with comparable radio duty cycle and latency performance.
Highlights
Intra-body communication (IBC) is a communication technology in which the devices attached on the human body exchange electro-magnetic (EM) waves through the human body itself as a communication medium to exchange messages with each other
We evaluate the performance of IB-medium access control (MAC) by comparing the performance of the IEEE 802.15.6 standards-based Carrier-sense multiple access with collision avoidance (CSMA/CA) and Slotted Aloha MAC protocols
In some cases, the radio duty cycle is lower for CSMA/CA and Slotted Aloha compared to IB-MAC, if we compare for the same goodput levels, we argue that IB-MAC shows a competitive performance
Summary
Intra-body communication (IBC) is a communication technology in which the devices attached on the human body exchange electro-magnetic (EM) waves through the human body itself as a communication medium to exchange messages with each other. With increasing numbers (and the distribution) of wearable devices, there is a need to increase mechanisms for managing a network around the human body while maintaining low power-usage profiles. By using the human body as the communication medium, EM waves can flow in the human body (as if we were using a wired communication mechanism) and the signals that we send through this interface can be more tolerant towards external interference. EM or ultrasound signals, once transmitted through a device, will propagate throughout the human body for any of the other devices to capture Such a feature suggests that the communication patterns of IBC, wireless, will be similar to a wired bus communication. Ultrasound-based IBC systems possess limitations in the amount of data it can transfer due to the propagation latency compared to EM waves
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