Abstract
IEEE 802.15.6 is a wireless body area network (WBAN) standard proposed to facilitate the exponentially growing interest in the field of health monitoring. This standard is flexible and outlines multiple basic medium-access control (MAC) protocols that are contention based and collision free to meet the WBAN quality-of-service (QoS) challenges. Typically, current research trends in WBAN MAC focus on designing a hybrid MAC that is a combination of basic MAC protocols. In this paper, we provide a first detailed survey of existing hybrid MAC protocols based on the IEEE 802.15.6, which would be useful for the related research community. First, this paper lists the design challenges of a WBAN MAC. Second, it highlights the significance of hybrid MAC protocols in meeting the design challenges while comparing them to standard MAC protocols. Third, a critical and thorough comparison of existing hybrid MAC protocols is presented in terms of network QoS and WBAN specific parameters. Finally, we identify key open research areas that are often neglected in hybrid MAC design and further propose some possible directions for future research.
Highlights
Over the past few years, advancements in Information and Communication Technology (ICT) have resulted in improvement of patient management such as disease diagnostics, monitoring, and automated data collection
Wireless Body Area Network (WBAN) is enhancing the development of various medical and non-medical applications. This has lead to new sets of specifications and requirements at the Medium Access Control (MAC) layer and subsequently the development of IEEE 802.15.6 standard in 2012
Along with the other specifications, this standard described basic MAC layer mechanisms to facilitate the development of application aware WBAN MAC protocols
Summary
Over the past few years, advancements in Information and Communication Technology (ICT) have resulted in improvement of patient management such as disease diagnostics, monitoring, and automated data collection. In a scenario where there are multiple WBAN devices on a body, the design of an intelligent and topology resilient MAC protocol is the key to achieve necessary throughput, energy efficiency, delay and security. The problems of energy efficiency, reliability and traffic can be resolved by using scheduling based MAC protocols, their performance degrades when topology changes rapidly or when the number of node increases. It provides a classification of existing hybrid MAC protocols based on the combination of basic access mechanisms and highlights the main design challenges of WBAN MAC. It investigates and compares existing IEEE 802.15.6 WBAN hybrid MAC protocols This comparison is made in terms of energy efficiency, throughput, delay, security, network lifetime, channel type and etc. The combination of any of these techniques can lead to a hybrid mechanism
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