Enhancement optimized MAC protocol for medical applications

Abstract

Growth of elderly population induces the increasing demands for high-quality healthcare services, wireless body area networks (WBANs) has emerged as a promising solution for monitoring of patients vital life signs parameters. Reliability and extending the lifetime are considered amongst the important and challenging issues in WBANs. The standard IEEE 802.15.4 is considered as the most used MAC protocol for medical sensor body area networks, owing to its low-power, low data rate and low-cost features. In this paper, we propose an enhancement optimized MAC protocol based on IEEE 802.15.4 dubbed EOMAC. The proposed protocol aims to enhance the reliability and to prolong the lifetime of the network, by reducing energy consumption.