Asynchronous on demand MAC protocol using wake-up radio in wireless body area network

Abstract

A fast growing class of sensing technology is wearable, where network nodes are tightly coupled with the human body. Wireless body area networks (WBAN) technology has gained popularity over the last few years, with a wide range of applications covered, in particular in health and rehabilitation. Wearable and pervasive computing are able to sense, monitor and process the data to provide smart assistance and context-aware ambient intelligence environments. However present-day WBAN devices are mainly battery-powered and due to energy issue they need to be recharged every day or even hours and thus they miss the expectations for a truly unobtrusive user experience. This work presents a novel energy-efficient asynchronous MAC protocol using a nano-watt wake up radio with addressing capabilities to reduce the energy consumption of the communication and then extend the WBAN life time. We present the benefits of the wake up radio in a star topology widely used in WBAN where the number of the node is around 5 to 10. The implemented protocol exploiting the low power consumption of the wake up radio, the low latency and the addressing capabilities can increase significantly the energy efficiency of the single node and entire network reducing both idle listening and data collisions. Result based on measured power consumption and OMNET++ simulation demonstrate that by using the wake up radio it is possible to reduce the power consumption up to 150 times compared to related protocols and the lifetime can be significantly increased in a real world scenario.