Low-Complexity, High-Throughput Multiple-Access Wireless Protocol for Body Sensor Networks

Abstract

Wireless systems that form a body-area network must be made small and low power without sacrificing performance. To achieve high-throughput communication in low-cost wireless body area networks, we propose a low complexity,“pulling” MAC protocol. Such a network architecture consists of low-complexity nodes and moderate complexity base stations, which act as clients to pull data from the nodes that act as thin servers. This organization achieves intra-network collision-free multiple access as in TDMA but without expensive time synchronization. It also achieves high utilization of air bandwidth and adaptivity of CSMA protocols but without collision or complexity on the node side. Experimental results show that our pulling protocol achieves better good channel utilization of up to 52.8% and high data throughput of up to 432Kbps. We also tested our MAC protocol on a wireless ECG system. Our MAC protocol can transmit ten simultaneous streams of data at 200 samples per second each from ten sensing devices.