A MAC Protocol for Medical Emergency Monitoring of Wireless Body Area Networks

An adaptive medium access control (MAC) protocol is specially designed for medical emergency monitoring to improve energy efficiency and satisfy data transmission delay requirements. By adopting a long superframe structure to avoid unnecessary beacons and allocating most of the superframe to inactive periods, the duty cycle is reduced to an extremely low level. Short active time slots are inserted into the superframe and shared by all nodes to deliver emergency data in a low-delay and reliable framework. Experimental results show the proposed MAC protocol works well for WBANs with low emergency data flow.