TRW-MAC: A thermal-aware receiver-driven wake-up radio enabled duty cycle MAC protocol for multi-hop implantable wireless body area networks in Internet of Things

Abstract

Implantable Wireless Body Area Network (IWBAN), a network of implantable medical sensors, is one of the emerging network paradigms due to the rapid proliferation of wireless technologies and growing demand of sophisticated healthcare. The wireless sensors in IWBAN is capable of communicating with each other through radio frequency (RF) link. However, recurring wireless communication inside the human body induces heat causing severe thermal damage to the human tissue which, if not controlled, may appear as a threat to human life. Moreover, higher propagation loss inside the human body as well as low-power requirement of the sensor nodes necessitate multi-hop communication for IWBAN. A IWBAN also requires meeting certain Quality of Service demands in terms of energy, delay, reliability etc. These pressing concerns engender the design of TRW-MAC: A thermal-aware receiver-driven wake-up radio enabled duty cycle MAC protocol for multi-hop IWBANs in Internet of Things. TRW-MAC introduces a thermal-aware duty cycle adjustment mechanism to reduce temperature inside the body and adopts wake-up radio (WuR) scheme for attaining higher energy efficiency. The protocol devises a wake-up estimation scheme to facilitate staggered wake-up schedule for multi-hop transmission. A superframe structure is introduced that utilizes both contention-based and contention free medium access operations. The performance of TRW-MAC is evaluated through simulations that exhibit its superior performance in attaining lower thermal-rise as well as satisfying other QoS metrics in terms of energy-efficiency, delay and reliability.