Wireless Body Area Networks (WBANs) can provide real-time and reliable health monitoring, attributing to the human-centered and sensor interoperability properties. WBANs have become a key component of the ubiquitous eHealth (electronic health) revolution that prospers on the basis of information and communication technologies. The prime consideration in WBAN is how to maximize the network lifetime with battery-powered sensor nodes in energy constraint. Novel solutions in Medium Access Control (MAC) protocols are imperative to satisfy the particular BAN scenario and the need of excellent energy efficiency in healthcare applications. In this paper, we propose a hybrid Lifetime Extended Directional Approach (LEDA) MAC protocol based on IEEE 802.15.6 to reduce energy consumption and prolong network lifetime. The LEDA MAC protocol takes full advantages of directional superiority in energy saving that employs multi-beam directional mode in Carrier Sense Multiple Access/Collision Avoidance (CSMA/CA) and single-beam directional mode in Time Division Multiple Access (TDMA) for alternative in data reservation and transmission according to the traffic varieties. Moreover, the impacts of some inherent problems of directional antennas such as deafness and hidden terminal problem can be decreased owing to that all nodes generate individual beam according to user priorities designated. Furthermore, LEDA MAC employs a Dynamic Polled Allocation Period (DPAP) for burst data transmissions to increase the network reliability and adaptability. Extensive analysis and simulation results show that the proposed LEDA MAC protocol achieves extended network lifetime with improved performance compared with IEEE 802.15.6.
Keywords: IEEE 802.15.6; MAC; WBAN; directional antenna; energy efficiency.