Modification of superframe structure of 802.15.4 MAC for body area networks

Abstract

The increasing use of wireless networks and the constant minituarization of electrical devices has empowered the development of body area networks (BAN). The BAN for medical applications cover continuous waveform sampling of biomedical signals, monitoring of vital signal information. In order to fulfill the diverse medical applications, these networks have to follow stringent technical requirements in terms of reliability (QoS), low power, data rate and noninterference. To meet these requirements, researchers have set up a task group 802.15.6 which is particularly working for BAN. Out of the available communication standards, IEEE 802.15.4 seems to be the nearest suitable candidate for BAN. However the researchers have pointed out unsuitability of available 802.15.4 standard in terms of scalability and interference issues. This paper have verified the suitability of 802.15.4 standard particularly scalability of MAC for single BAN in terms of throughput, power consumption, and delay. Also the paper suggests modification in the MAC superframe structure of existing 802.15.4 and thereby addresses the scalability issue. With modified structure, there is an improvement in all the above mentioned parameters .