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This article has been accepted for publication in a future issue of this journal, but has not been

fully edited. Content may change prior to final publication. Citation information: DOI
10.1109/TMC.2016.2549008, IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing

Medium Access Control for Wireless Body


Area Networks with QoS Provisioning and
Energy Efficient Design
Bin Liu, Member, IEEE, Zhisheng Yan, and Chang Wen Chen, Fellow, IEEE

AbstractWith the promising applications in e-Health and entertainment services, wireless body area network (WBAN) has
attracted significant interest. One critical challenge for WBAN is to track and maintain the quality of service (QoS), e.g., delivery
probability and latency, under the dynamic environment dictated by human mobility. Another important issue is to ensure the
energy efficiency within such a resource-constrained network. In this paper, a new medium access control (MAC) protocol is
proposed to tackle these two important challenges. We adopt a TDMA-based protocol and dynamically adjust the transmission
order and transmission duration of the nodes based on channel status and application context of WBAN. The slot allocation
is optimized by minimizing energy consumption of the nodes, subject to the delivery probability and throughput constraints.
Moreover, we design a new synchronization scheme to reduce the synchronization overhead. Through developing an analytical
model, we analyze how the protocol can adapt to different latency requirements in the healthcare monitoring service. Simulations
results show that the proposed protocol outperforms CA-MAC and IEEE 802.15.6 MAC in terms of QoS and energy efficiency
under extensive conditions. It also demonstrates more effective performance in highly heterogeneous WBAN.

1 I NTRODUCTION network (WSN) have been widely studied, they can-


not be directly applied in WBAN applications. First,
T HANKS to advanced radio technologies and
sensor hardware, wireless body area network
(WBAN) has become practically feasible. WBAN has
a WSN is relatively stationary. However, a WBAN
worn by a person is highly mobile, which results in
the unique features of on-body channel and traffic [4].
attracted strong interest due to its potential economic
Second, MAC protocols for WSN usually target a large
impacts in numerous applications, such as vital sign
number of sensors, which makes them distributed in
monitoring, interactive gaming, and telemedicine. The
nature. Nevertheless, this is not the case for WBAN [4]
system architecture of a typical WBAN-based system
and thus the design principle can be totally different.
is shown in Fig. 1. WBAN is composed of multiple
We identify the unique challenges of WBAN MAC
on-body sensor nodes, and a personal server (PS)
design as follows.
equipped on human body. Since the communication
range of sensor nodes is 2-3 m [2], [3], these nodes are
Ensuring reliable transmission under the lossy
usually organized as a star-topology mobile network.
on-body channel: Body movement may cause
Thus the body sensor nodes can gather a variety of
deep fading that immediately leads to frame loss
physiological information, as well as delivering them
[5], e.g., when the moving arms or legs obstruct
to the PS for displaying and processing. The quality
a communication path. This is further compli-
of service (QoS) requirement of the data delivery
cated by the fact that the deep fading of on-
is adjusted by the PS when it detects the change
body channel lasts much longer (up to 400 ms)
of monitoring contexts. Alternatively, the emergency
than traditional wireless networks [6]. Hence,
users, e.g., doctors, and normal users, e.g., family
an accurate yet mathematically tractable channel
members, can proactively send requests to the PS
model is needed to design the MAC and thus
to change the delivery requirement. This way, body
guarantee the delivery probability.
area information can be effectively collected without
Allocating appropriate channel resources for het-
interrupting peoples normal activities.
erogeneous and dynamic traffic: The data traffic
One critical research task for WBAN is the medium of different sensors are dynamically dictated by
access control (MAC), that is, how should the sensor the sensor functionalities, body movements, and
nodes access the limited wireless channel resources environment status [7]. For example, when a
in order to ensure efficient and reliable data trans- cardiomyopathy patient is exercising, sampling
mission. Although MAC protocols for wireless sensor rate of heart-related data should be increased
and more data should be sent with high priority
The preliminary results were presented at HealthCom 2012 [1].
Bin Liu and Zhisheng Yan contributed equally to this work (co-first author in this abnormal context. Meanwhile, the QoS
in alphabetical order) demand for heart-unrelated data, such as elec-
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This article has been accepted for publication in a future issue of this journal, but has not been fully edited. Content may change prior to final publication. Citation information: DOI
10.1109/TMC.2016.2549008, IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing

to maximize energy efficiency when a set of values


can satisfy the QoS.
In the following, we focus the description on health-
care monitoring, the most important WBAN applica-
tion. The design principles however are generic and
are applicable to other WBAN applications.

2 R ELATED W ORK
Fig. 1. General architecture of WBAN-based system. IEEE has finalized the 802.15.6 WBAN standard [2],
where multiple MAC techniques, such as scheduled
access, polling, and contention access, are supported
tromyography (EMG), can be relaxed. in a beacon-based superframe. Another related stan-
Maximizing the energy efficiency for the power- dard is Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE), where the MAC
hungry body sensor nodes: Body sensors usually layer adopts a TDMA based structure. Sensors pe-
need to work for months or even years without riodically wake up to initiate/schedule and trans-
interruption. It is a non-trivial task to strike a mit the data via the advertising and data channel,
balance between minimized energy and guaran- respectively. However, both 802.15.6 and BLE MAC
teed QoS. For example, more transmission might introduce large overhead in the periodic synchro-
result in higher throughput and lower average nization. Besides, there is no dedicated design for
delay, but will inevitably consume more energy. the dynamic traffic and channel in WBAN, which
Recently, MAC protocols specifically for WBAN could significantly degrade QoS. We now review prior
have been proposed to address the dynamic traffic works that address these issues.
pattern [8], [9] or the energy efficiency [10], [11]. How- Energy Efficiency. Exiting WBAN MAC proto-
ever, they focus on tackling each individual WBAN cols enhanced the energy efficiency primarily by
issue. The unique features of WBAN channel, traffic TDMA multiplexing [8], [10][12] or reducing the
and energy have not been comprehensively studied in communication frequency of beacons [13]. However,
the context of MAC designs. The goal of this research the synchronization of such superframe-based struc-
is to jointly explore the unique features of WBAN tures would consume extra energy. Therefore, energy-
at the physical and application layer, and to design efficient synchronization have been studied. In [11],
a MAC protocol for star-topology WBANs that can the sensors were synchronized via detecting their own
guarantee both QoS and energy efficiency. signal peaks driven by the heartbeat. However, this
In particular, we propose a general time division cannot always be robust since the change of heartbeat
multiple access (TDMA) based MAC protocol that rhythm may not be reflected simultaneously on all
can flexibly address the QoS of heterogeneous sensors the sensors and some sensors, e.g., accelerometers,
in different monitoring contexts (see Section 4.3 for may not be used to extract the heartbeat. Our work
definition) and can maximize the energy efficiency. differs from all these works in that we propose a
The proposed MAC protocol can adapt to the time- new synchronization scheme to dynamically adjust
varying channel and traffic of WBAN by dynamically synchronizing frequency and maximize the interval
optimizing the transmission schedule, i.e., transmission between two synchronization, which could largely
order and transmission duration, of each sensor node. reduce the overhead. More importantly, we do not
Besides, it proactively minimizes the energy consump- independently consider the energy issue. Instead, we
tion of sensor nodes while ensuring desirable deliv- minimize the energy while satisfying QoS constraints
ery probability and throughput. To further reduce via optimal slot allocation.
energy consumption, we embed a new synchroniza- Lossy On-body Channel. The long-lasting deep
tion scheme in the proposed MAC protocol without fading of WBAN is especially troublesome for static
impacting its optimality. Moreover, we develop an TDMA assignment [8], [10][12]. Using static TDMA,
analytical model to investigate the latency perfor- a node will obtain consecutive slots and thus its
mance of the proposed MAC protocol. We explore frames are transmitted one by one. If a frame is
the parameters space and analyze how the proposed lost due to deep fading, the subsequent transmission
protocol can adapt to different latency requirements, would be, most probably, dropped again because
which theoretically guides the real-world deployment. the deep fading of WBAN lasts for such a long
Finally, we evaluate the QoS and energy of the pro- interval (up to 400 ms) that multiple frames could
posed MAC protocol and therein validate the designs be scheduled for transmission by WBAN radio [6].
and analysis by extensive simulations. Our results Consequently, repeated frame loss would occur.
show that the proposed MAC protocol is especially In [14], the authors proposed to reduce frame loss
suitable for highly heterogeneous WBAN and that we using a variable TDMA scheduling algorithm. They
should choose the largest possible superframe length dynamically moved forward or backward nodes
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This article has been accepted for publication in a future issue of this journal, but has not been fully edited. Content may change prior to final publication. Citation information: DOI
10.1109/TMC.2016.2549008, IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing

transmission in such a way that node average delivery and body coupled communications (BCC). However,
probability could be improved. Nevertheless, since the body area communication is restricted to BCC
only one single slot was allocated to a node and the rather than the more commonly deployed RF WBAN.
goal of the algorithm was limited to decreasing node In [19], a receiver-initiated MAC protocol was de-
average loss rate, it was highly likely for high-priority veloped for rapid and robust sensor data delivery.
nodes to undergo unacceptable throughput and frame The authors focused on spectrum access to handle
loss. Recently, CA-MAC protocol that adopted a hy- the inter-BAN interference while not examining the
brid TDMA and contention based superframe was body movement pattern and the resulting challenges
proposed to address the WBAN deep fading [3], for sensor-to-PS transmission. In summary, the pro-
[15]. Thanks to the random backoff in contention posed MAC protocol is essentially different from these
period, the frame transmission from nodes/links are schemes because it targets the body area transmission
interleaved. Therefore, when a node regains its op- by comprehensively exploring the mobility-incurred
portunity of transmission after a delivery failure and channel and traffic characteristics of WBAN. It also
subsequent random backoffs, the link condition might formulates an optimal slot allocation to minimize the
have improved and accordingly the retransmission energy subject to QoS constraints. The new synchro-
might succeed. However, the usage of contention nization scheme and analytical performance model
period could negatively impact the energy efficiency further compliment the energy efficiency and QoS
and channel utilization. In this paper, we instead guarantee.
utilize the collision-free TDMA and then formulate
a slot allocation optimization in order to guarantee
3 S YSTEM M ODEL
the different QoS requirements among heterogeneous
sensors. We also mitigate the impact of fading by opti- 3.1 Basic Framework
mally adjusting transmission order, which is based on We consider the star-topology WBAN, as shown in
formal WBAN channel and traffic model rather than Fig. 1. The PS is not power hungry and hence we
simply depending on the contention to blindly spread only consider power consumption of sensors. The
the transmission in time, as is done in [3], [15]. PS manages the major operations of WBAN, such
Dynamic Traffic. The variation of monitoring con- as resynchronization, context recognition, and com-
texts brings time-varying sensor sampling rate and puting tranmission schedule. We assume there are N
WBAN traffic. This could deteriorate the performance sensor nodes in the WBAN and each node i belongs
of protocols using fixed resource allocation [10][13]. to the sensor nodes set N .
As such, researchers adaptively adjusted TDMA slots We employ a TDMA-based MAC protocol to pre-
[16] or separated the slots into data and control pur- vent collisions, idle listening, and overhearing. As
pose for prompt transmission [8]. In [9], a contention- shown in Fig. 2a, we divide the time axis into pe-
based WBAN system was designed for falls assess- riodic time intervals, called superframes, with constant
ment, where high-priority nodes in current context length T . A superframe consists of beacon, active, and
can interrupt low-priority nodes and aggregate the inactive part. The beacon part is used by the PS to
data for fast transmission. However, this design could broadcast messages to the sensor nodes. The active
introduce severe collisions due to its contention na- part is comprised of consecutive slots and each slot
ture. Besides, it is computationally impractical for can accommodate one frame transmission (including
sensor nodes to decide what is the current context data transmission, ACK reception, and radio transi-
and which types of data needs to be gathered with tion time) from one node. Since the radio turnaround
high priority, which is usually complicated analysis time between transmitting and receiving state is much
rather than simple out-of-bound computation. In [17], smaller than the time for one frame transmission,
the authors used wakeup radio signals to activate the it is disregarded in this paper. The guard time slot
sensor nodes from sleep state and to allocate channel (Tg ) is added in order to prevent slot overlapping
resources when abnormal traffic comes. However, an and perform the proposed synchronization scheme.
extra wakeup circuit is added in traditional sensor After sufficient slots have been reserved for the sen-
nodes, which introduces additional hardware com- sor nodes according to sampling rate requirement,
plexity. Our work, instead, utilizes the centralized the rest of the superframe is considered as inactive
nature of WBANs and allows the PS to adaptively al- part, during which no transmission is scheduled. In
locate the slots based on traffic demand, which adapts order to achieve these functions, we define the MAC
to the dynamic contexts. Thanks to this asymmetric frame format of the proposed protocol based on IEEE
architecture, we distribute the computation of context 802.15.6 standard [2], as shown in Fig. 2b.
switching and slot allocation to the powerful PS.
Cross-layer Designs. The authors in [18] studied
the two-tier sensor-to-PS and PS-to-network commu- 3.2 Channel Model
nications and improved delay, reliability, and energy IEEE 802.15.6 BAN standard has suggested the use
performance by properly using radio frequency (RF) of Markov channel models since experiments have
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Variable
General
MAC Header MAC Frame Body FCS
Superframe T Format
Active Inactive Variable
B
Scheduled for Scheduled for Scheduled Data Frame RX TX BAN
Sampled Data FCS
Frame Control ID ID ID
node 1 node 2 for others
Variable
Beacon Frame RX TX BAN
Syn Info Tx Schedule FCS
Frame Control ID ID ID
Uplink 3 bytes
Data ACK ACK Frame RX TX BAN Syn Info
Downlink FCS
Tg Frame Control ID ID ID (optional)
B -- Beacon
(a) (b)
Fig. 2. a) TDMA-based superframe structure of the proposed MAC protocol; b) MAC frame format of the
proposed MAC protocol.

verified that Markov models can effectively charac- If the channel state of the given slot is known (p0 = 0
terize the WBAN channel dynamics [6], [20]. In this or p0 = 1), we then can estimate the future channel
paper, we model the on-body channel at each link condition using (2). We next present two propositions
(between each sensor node and the PS) during a par- that shed light on the important properties of the
ticular mobility pattern (called activity) as a two-state Markov channel model.
Markov process. A frame can be successfully received Proposition 1: When , p( ) PQ BG
=
in good state while it will be dropped in bad state. PBG
PBG +PGB . The larger Q is, the more (1Q) /Q shrinks
Since measurement studies have shown that channel and the faster p( ) converges.
condition is directly correlated to human activity [6], Proposition 2: Let be a small time interval. Given
[21], the model parameters differ in different activities. Q < 1, we have p( ) < p( + ) if p0 = 0 and p( ) >
Such modeling is feasible since human body presents p( + ) if p0 = 1.
a stable moving pattern under a given activity (e.g., Remark 1: Proposition 1 emphasizes that under a
walking) and thereby the Markov characterization given activity the probability to be good eventually
exists in each link. Besides, the unchanged channel converges to a value that represents the steady frac-
condition during one slot is especially true for WBAN tion of good slots, i.e., the steady delivery probability.
due to its long-lasting nature of channel state [6], e.g., Furthermore, Q signifies the channel variation speed.
up to 400 ms (dozens of frames) in bad state. That is, the channel would vary from good/bad state
Specifically, the Markov transition probability ma- to steady state faster with a larger Q. Proposition 2
trix P can be denoted as, manifests that the delivery probability is either mono-
[ ] tonically increasing or decreasing when the initial
1 PBG PBG
P= (1) channel is bad or good, respectively. The constraint
PGB 1 PGB
(Q < 1) has been shown to hold under extensive
where PGB represents the probability of a good state measurements of typical WBAN settings [14] and
transits to a bad state, i.e., the probability of a nodes hence it is assumed to be true in the following.
frame loss in current slot given its successful transmis-
sion in the previous slot. Similarly, PBG represents the 4 P ROPOSED MAC P ROTOCOL
probability of a bad state transits to a good state. Note 4.1 Basic Operations
that a link may have different transition probability
We first describe the basic operations conducted at the
matrix under different human activities, and different
PS and sensor nodes.
links may have different P due to their heterogeneous
locations. Under a particular activity, however, each 1) PS broadcasts a beacon frame (as the format in
links Markov characterization (P) is fixed [14], [21]. Fig. 2b) with the initial synchronization message,
We denote the probability of a link being in good state including clock information, superframe length
at a given slot as p0 and the sum of PBG and PGB as and slot length. The initial sampling rate and
Q. Then the probability for this link to be good state initial time to transmit/sleep for each sensor
after slots (during the same activity) is [14] are also derived via initial transmission schedule
(random order and equal duration) and embed-
[ ]
[ ] 0 ded in the beacon.
p( ) = 1 p0 p0 (P) 2) Sensors synchronize with PS via initial beacon.
1
PBG p0 PGB [1 p0 ]PBG 3) Sensors receive the sampling rate and transmis-
= + (1 Q) (2) sion schedule in the beacon frame. Then they
Q Q
{ collect the data using received sampling rate and
PBG
PBG (1Q) p0 = 0 schedule the next time to transmit/sleep before
= PQ Q
PGB (1Q)
Q + p0 = 1
BG
Q entering sleep.
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4) Sensors wake up at the scheduled slots and the monotonically varying p( ) in (2), we observe
transmit one or more data frames based on the that the delivery probability for GOOD nodes will
transmission duration. These data will be used decrease from 1.0 to PQ BG
with regard to (w.r.t.) time,
by the PS to recognize the current context. and increase from 0 to PQ BG
w.r.t. time for BAD nodes.
5) PS replies an ACK upon receiving a data frame Remark 2 (Between Set Ordering): Due to such
from a sensor. The resynchronization informa- monotonicity, GOOD (BAD) nodes would enjoy
tion is optionally embedded in the ACK only if a higher (lower) delivery probability if they are
the clock drift would cause frame collision. scheduled to transmit sooner in the upcoming
6) Sensors power off and save energy during oth- superframe. Thus, our first ordering rule is to assign
ers scheduled slots. all GOOD nodes in the former part of a superframe
7) PS analyzes the received sensor data and only before all BAD nodes.
sends out updated sampling rate and trans- Within Set Ordering. As sensor nodes have hetero-
mission schedule via the beacon frame at the geneous link status and QoS demands, it is important
upcoming superframe. The transmission order is to ensure that the delivery probability of node i sat-
first decided by two ordering rules (Section 4.2) isfies a threshold T Hi . We aim at adjusting the order
and the transmission duration is then obtained of nodes within each set such that those individual
by solving the optimal slot allocation problem thresholds can be approached as close as possible.
(Section 4.3). For node i GOOD, if the delivery probability
8) Repeat step 3) through step 7). of its last assigned transmission in the upcoming su-
This way, a sensor i is able to periodically acquire perframe is larger than the threshold T Hi , its frames
these scheduled access information. If it misses a scheduled before this last assigned slot can also enjoy
beacon, it will simply keep asleep during the super- reliable transmission due to its monotonically decreas-
frame and wake up at the next beacon period. We ing delivery probability. We can therefore give the
have found in the evaluations that by increasing the delivery probability constraint for node i, i GOOD,
transmit power of the non-power-hungry PS to -10 p(Di + xi ) T Hi xi ai (3)
dBm, only negligible amount ( 1%) of beacons were
lost, which did not cause any significant impacts on where Di indicates how many slots have passed
the overall performance. Hence, we adopt this simple since the last transmission of node i in the previous
strategy to handle beacon loss. superframe, xi is the index showing which slot is its
last allocated slot in the upcoming superframe, and ai
is the upper bound of this index. That is, we should
4.2 Adjusting Transmissin Order schedule all the transmissions for node i, i GOOD,
In this section, we estimate the dynamic channel sta- before the ai th slot of the upcoming superframe.
tus and thus adjust the transmission order of nodes to Similarly, for node i BAD, if its first scheduled
achieve relatively high delivery probability. Note that transmission in the upcoming superframe enjoys a
although the channel model parameters is fixed for delivery probability larger than the threshold, its other
a certain activity, e.g., walking, the link status is still transmissions can be all reliable. The corresponding
time-varying. The fixed activity only means P is time- delivery probability constraint of node i, i BAD, is
invariant. When the activity is changed, which can
p(Di + yi ) T Hi yi bi (4)
be easily detected by context recognition algorithms
using sensor data (e.g., from accelerometer and/or where yi is the index that shows which slot is the first
inertial sensor) [22][24], the PS only needs to utilize allocated slot for node i in the upcoming superframe,
the updated channel model with new parameters and and bi is the lower bound of such index. That is, we
conduct the channel estimation. The channel model should schedule all the transmissions for node i, i
parameters for typical activities can be pre-collected BAD, after the bi th slot of the upcoming superframe.
from experimental results. Hence, we focus on the Remark 3 (Within Set Ordering): To help each indi-
introduction of channel estimation and transmission vidual GOOD (BAD) node to achieve their delivery
order adjustment under a given activity. probability threshold, we need to order them within
Between Set Ordering. Given that the PS only the GOOD (BAD) set based on the upper bound ai
obtains outdated link status when listening to sen- (lower bound bi ) of their assigned slots. Thus, the
sors in their respective slots, the most recent channel second ordering rule is that a GOOD node with a
status available to the PS is the outcome of the last larger upper bound should be scheduled after the one
allocated transmission for each node in the previous with a smaller upper bound. Similarly, a BAD node
superframe. These most recent outcomes are termed i should be scheduled before node j if bi < bj .
as initial channel state, X0 . We denote sensor nodes By computing all ai s for node i GOOD and all
with initially good and bad channel state as the set bi s for node i BAD, as well as carrying out the two
GOOD = {i|X0,i = 1} = {i|p0,i = 1} and BAD = ordering rules, we can decide the transmission order
{i|X0,i = 0} = {i|p0,i = 0}, respectively. Considering in a channel-aware way.
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4.3 Optimizing Transmission Duration Formally, the corresponding constraint for node i to
We have introduced the adjustment of transmission achieve desirable throughput is given by
order that facilitates reliable transmission. However,
in order to guarantee the delivery probability and ni (RTdata Loh ) Si T (7)
throughput, it is still essential to quantitatively study
the transmission duration of nodes to complete the
slot allocation. In this section, we formulate the optimal where R is the transmission rate of the radio platform,
slot allocation problem, in order to seek the optimal Tdata is the duration of transmitting a data frame, Loh
transmission duration, i.e., the number of assigned is the overhead bits per frame, and Si is the minimum
slots ni , for each node in the upcoming superframe. throughput (derived from sampling rate) currently
Delivery Probability Constraint. We have derived required by application-layer services for node i.
the constraint of delivery probability for the proposed Accordingly, those sensor nodes more related to
WBAN in (3-4). Now we convert them into the for- the new monitoring context (larger Si ) would obtain
mulas w.r.t. the number of assigned slots ni . By using more slots for data transfer. However, other irrelevant
(3), we have explained that all allocated slots for nodes (smaller Si ) would release some or all of the
node i GOOD should be ordered before the ai th slots, reducing the energy cost.
slot so as to meet the threshold T Hi . Thus the total Optimal Slot Allocation. Since the PS can be easily
number of slots scheduled for node i and the nodes recharged, the optimization objective is to minimize
before i should not exceed ai . The delivery probability the total energy consumption of the power-hungry
constraint for node i, i GOOD, can be converted as sensors, subject to the constraints of delivery probabil-

ni + nj ai (5) ity and throughput. The sensors energy consumption
{j|aj <ai }
primarily results from data transmission, ACK recep-
tion, radio wakeup transition (from sleeping to trans-
Similarly, we can also re-write the constraint of deliv- mitting/receiving), and reception of synchronization
ery probability for node i BAD as information. Other energy consumption factors are

ng + nj b i (6) not considered because they are usually multiple or-
{g|ag amax } {j|bj <bi }
ders of magnitude smaller than the energy consump-
tion caused by transmission or reception. Since the
where amax = max{ai |i GOOD}. frequency of wakeup transition is fixed for sensors
Throughput Constraint. To handle the various and the synchronization is impacted by clock drift
types of traffic and the dynamic nature of WBAN, we rather than slot allocation, the objective is equivalent
introduce the concept of monitoring contexts. to minimizing the energy consumption of data com-
Definition 1 (Monitoring Context): A monitoring munications, i.e., the total number of assigned slots,
context is a medical scenario that is decided by in the upcoming superframe. Then we can formulate
diagnosis and human mobility, and is predefined the optimal slot allocation problem as
by doctors. For example, three contexts can be
defined for a healthy 20 year-old person, i.e., normal
(walking/80-120 heart rate), alert (exercising/120-200 min iN ni
heart rate), and emergency (maximum efforts/more s. t. ni (RT
data Loh ) Si T i N
than 200 heart rate) [25]. In different contexts, doctors ni + {j|aj <ai } nj ai i GOOD

require different sampling rate to assist the treatment. n + {j|bj <bi } nj bi
i BAD
{g|ag amax } T g
We aim at adjusting the transmission duration iN ni Tslot i N
(number of slots) of each sensor such that their traffic (8)
requirement in current context can be satisfied. For where Tslot is the duration of a frame transmission
example, the slots for heartbeat data should be in- slot. By using the first constraint, we ensure the
creased during emergency context in order to meet transmitted data is no less than the application-level
the increased sampling rate. This feature is termed as traffic load. We also guarantee the reliable transmis-
context-awareness. To recognize context variation of sion of GOOD and BAD nodes via the second and
the person, the PS collects and analyzes data frames third constraint, respectively. Finally, with the last
from multiple sensors, e.g., via heart rate and motion constraint, the total number of allocated slots can be
data. Notice that context recognition algorithms have limited to the length of the superframe. Considering
been widely studied [22][24]. The protocol can sim- the fact that the constraints and the objective of (8)
ply borrow existing algorithms, which will not affect are all linear, and the number of assigned slots shall
the design of the proposed MAC. be a integer, the formulated problem is an Integer
In order to guarantee the context-aware transmis- Linear Programming problem, which can be solved
sion, the amount of transmitted data of each type of efficiently [26]. By solving (8), the PS can periodically
sensor nodes should be always larger than the mini- compute the optimal transmission duration for each
mum throughput requirement in the current context. node after the transmission order adjustment.
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4.4 Synchronization Scheme wait more time before resynchronization. The PS then
The synchronization overhead is one of the main ob- encapsulates Syn Info field, if any, into an ACK and
stacles for traditional beacon-enabled protocols. In [2], sends it to the corresponding sensor node. The sensor
[15], for example, all the sensor nodes have to receive can accordingly adjust the local clock relying on the
synchronization information periodically through the value of Syn Info after receiving the ACK frame.
beacon frame even if some of them are still synchro- Since the times of resynchronization only depends
nized with the PS. on the property of nodes clocks and is not related
In this section, we propose a new synchronization to transmission order or duration, the proposed syn-
scheme to decrease the synchronization overhead, chronization scheme can be directly added into the
where the sensor nodes only need to resynchronize proposed MAC protocol to reduce overhead whereas
through ACK frames when the clock drift may cause not negatively impacting the optimal slot allocation.
overlapped transmission and they do not have to
synchronize in every superframe. 5 L ATENCY A NALYSIS
After a certain synchronization, the clock drift be- Recall that the transmission order of sensor nodes are
tween the clocks of each sensor node and the PS dynamically moved forward and backward in every
increases w.r.t. time. A sensor node might transmit superframe to enure reliability. This mechanism re-
a frame before or after the beginning of the assigned sults in a distinct latency performance compared with
slot, which might cause overlapped transmission with conventional protocols with fixed transmission order.
other nodes. Thereby, we incorporate a guard time slot Therefore, in this section, we analyze the proposed
into a frame transmission slot after the ACK reception MAC protocol in terms of latency, which is another
in order to avoid such frame collisions. important QoS requirement, especially in heathcare
The length of the guard time slot Tg should be monitoring application. More importantly, we demon-
deliberately set to accommodate both forward and strate the impacts of protocol parameters on latency
backward overlapping. In the proposed MAC, the performance and how we can adjust the parameters
transmission order of sensor nodes is dynamically in order to meet different WBAN requirements.
adjusted in every superframe. The maximum duration
of a node not receiving an ACK from the PS is 5.1 Latency of Normal Context
2T Tslot Tb , where Tb is the duration of a beacon
slot. The maximum duration is achieved when the In a normal monitoring context for WBAN, data
node transmits at the first slot in a superframe and frames are generated with a constant inter-arrival
then transmits at the last slot in the next superframe. time. Due to the throughput constraint in (7), peri-
The maximum clock drift over the maximum duration odically generated frames during a superframe can
between a nodes two receptions of ACK is then be successfully transmitted by the end of the next
(2T Tslot Tb ), where is the frequency tolerance. superframe. Accordingly, the maximum latency for
Since the clock drift could be either forward or back- an arbitrary frame in a normal context is thus 2T
ward, the transmission of a senor could be delayed or Tb TACK Tg , where TACK is the duration for
advanced. To avoid the transmission overlapping, the receiving a complete ACK frame (including Syn Info
guard time slot Tg is therefore given by field). This case occurs when the frame arrives at the
transmission queue just after the nodes assigned slot
Tg = 2(2T Tslot Tb ) (9) which happens to be the first slot of a superframe,
and then is transmitted at the last slot of next su-
T
Note that 2g is the upper bound of the clock drift over perframe. This latency bound (e.g., 300ms in our
the time interval between two receptions of ACK, i.e, evaluations) can generally satisfy the requirement in
only one node is likely yet unnecessary to accumulate normal context [7]. We can also tune the values of the
such a drift. In reality, the clock drift of a node protocol parameters (T , Tb , TACK , etc.) offline before
between two ACK receptions could be any value in the system starts in order to meet more strict latency
T
the range from 0 to 2g . bound.
Regarding the operation procedure of the proposed However, coarse analysis of delay bound is not
synchronization scheme, a sensor node should first sufficient for an abnormal context because its traffic
encapsulate the local clock information (time-stamp) pattern and latency sensitivity is quite diverse. That is,
into the frame control field of a data frame. When a fine-grained and exact delay analysis for each sensor
the PS receives the data frame, it takes the clock is needed. Hence, we primarily focus on the latency
information and compares that with its own clock analysis of abnormal contexts in the following section.
information. If the time interval between the two Moreover, when there is a context switch, we assume
T
clocks exceeds half the guard time slot (i.e., 2g ), the the queued frames at a node will be dropped so that
transmission overlapping may occur. Then the control the PS can receive the most recent sensor data for the
field Syn Info is set as the time interval. Otherwise, no new context. Accordingly, the latency performance of
operation is needed, which means the sensor node can those frames is not evaluated in this paper.
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5.2 Latency of Other Abnormal Contexts transmission slots, we have pslot = . Note that a
Due to the time-varying sampling requirement and node would not necessarily transmit a frame during
body movements, WBAN may be in different types a frame transmission slot since the queue might be
of abnormal contexts, e.g., alert or emergency context. empty then. Besides, we also have pslot + psleep = 1.
In an abnormal context, the inter-arrival time between Therefore, the expected remaining time Tr is given by
two frames in a sensor nodes transmission queue is a
Tr = pslot T r,slot +psleep T r,sleep = T r,slot +(1)T r,sleep
random variable. We model the arrivals of frames at a (13)
sensor node in abnormal contexts as a Poisson process
where T r,slot and T r,sleep is the expected remaining
as some existing WBAN systems [27], [28]. Notice that time of the transmission slot and sleep period, respec-
the frame arrival rate of a sensor at different abnormal
tively. Since a frame tends to arrive halfway through
contexts is different. We thus denote the frame arrival the transmission slot on average and the duration of
rate of node i at the time t as i (t). In a TDMA-based
a slot is fixed at Tslot , we have
system, after a given node finishes the scheduled
transmission slots, it would enter sleep state when Tslot
T r,slot = . (14)
other nodes are scheduled for transmission. For the 2
given node, the experienced sleep can be viewed In contrast, for a given node, the duration of the
as the servers vacation in queueing theory. Hence, sleep period is highly variable depending on many
we model each sensor node as an M/D/1 queueing factors, such as the most recent transmission outcome
system with vacations [29]. We assume frames at each of all nodes and the slot allocation of the previous
node are served in the first come first served manner. superframe. Thus the durations of consecutive sleep
Since it takes Tslot to finish one frame transmission, periods seen by the node can be approximated as
the service rate of node i at the time t is given independent. Therefore, the expected remaining time
1
by i (t) = Tslot . Thus the utilization factor i (t) of the sleep period for a node is approximated as
(i (t) < 1) is given by [29] uniformly distributed in the possible range. In Section
i (t) 6, we will demonstrate the closeness with which
i (t) = = Tslot i (t) (10) the analytical approximation matches the simulation
i (t)
results. Due to the adjustment of transmission order,
We now derive the expected frame latency, which the duration of the remaining sleep period for node i
consists of queueing and transmission latency. To ranges from 0 to 2T Tb 2nmin,i Tslot , where nmin,i is
simplify the notation, we consider an arbitrary frame the minimum number of allocated slots for node i to
arrival, regardless of the context the system belongs Si T
satisfy traffic requirement, i.e., nmin,i = RTdata Loh .
to (i.e., regardless of t). We first derive the queueing The maximum remaining sleep period is achieved
latency. For a given node, a frame may arrive when when the node is ordered as the first one in the current
the node is experiencing the frame transmission slot superframe while as the last one in the next super-
or the sleep period. The frame has to wait until the frame. Thus the expected remaining sleep period for
frame transmission slot or the sleep period ends. Then node i is approximated as
it also needs to wait for the transmission of the frames
that arrive at the queue before it. Hence, the expected 2T Tb 2nmin,i Tslot
T r,sleep (15)
queueing latency of an arbitrary frame Tq is given by 2
E[N ] By using (12-15), the expected queueing latency of an
Tq = Tr + (11) arbitrary frame Tq for node i can be obtained. Finally,

the expected latency of a frame Ttotal for node i is
where Tr is the expected remaining time for the the sum of the expected queueing latency and the
transmission slot or sleep period and E[N ] is the expected transmission latency, i.e.,
expected number of frames that are already in the
queue. According to Littles law [29], the expected Ttotal =Tq + Tdata
number of frames in the queue seen by the given node Tslot 2T Tb 2nmin,i Tslot
is E[N ] = Tq . Therefore, Tq can be expressed as + + Tdata
2(1 ) 2
2T Tb
Tq = Tr + Tq = Tr + Tq =( nmin,i )Tslot + + Tdata
2(1 ) 2
(12) (16)
Tr
= Tq =
1 According to (16), when the proposed MAC pro-
Now we derive the expected remaining time Tr . tocol is deployed (i.e., when the protocol parameters
We denote the probability that a frame arrives during including T , Tslot , Tb , Tdata and Loh are fixed), the ex-
the given nodes transmission slot and sleep period pected frame latency of node i in an abnormal context

as pslot and psleep , respectively. Since the utilization is determined by 2(1) and nmin,i . Notice that nodes
factor represents the fraction of time for frame with higher traffic requirement have larger value of
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2(1) and nmin,i . We also find that nmin,i changes In Section 6, we will show that the latency of abnor-

more significantly than 2(1) when the traffic re- mal frames is monotonically and smoothly increasing
quirement varies, which indicates that the variation as T increases, which assists us to choose appropri-
trend of nmin,i will decide the trend of Ttotal . Such ate protocol parameters when deploying applications
relation always holds under practical settings of QoS with different latency bounds.
parameters as we will demonstrate in Section 6.
Remark 4: Nodes with higher traffic requirement 6 P ERFORMANCE E VALUATIONS
would achieve lower frame latency, which inher-
ently meets the heterogeneous latency requirement of In this section, we evaluate the performance of the
WBAN. Besides, when a given nodes traffic require- proposed MAC protocol in three aspects: reliability,
ment dynamically increases or decreases, based on energy efficiency, and latency.
(16), the frame latency of this node would adaptively Simulation Modules. We built a event-driven
decreases or increases, respectively. WBAN system using MATLAB. The application mod-
We have showed above how the proposed MAC ule generates constant-bit rate and Poisson traffic
protocol addressing heterogeneous and dynamic traf- depending on the context. The MAC module supports
fic. However, Ttotal may not always be able to satisfy multiple basic access schemes, such as scheduled ac-
the individual latency bound under a specific abnor- cess and random access. By combining or modifying
mal context. Although we may increase the traffic these schemes, one can implement a specific MAC
requirement of a particular node to decrease its ex- protocol for evaluations. For the proposed protocol,
pected latency, such operation is usually not allowed we also embed YALMIP [30], an MATLAB-based op-
and may not work well. Hence, we sometimes need to timization toolbox, to solve the optimization in (8).
carefully configure the protocol parameters before the The channel module simulates the deep-fading on-
deployment of the proposed MAC protocol. Further body channel by first generating a channel state of
converting (16), Ttotal can be derived as follows. a slot based on the Markov model in Section 3.2
and then computing a received power satisfying that
Tslot Tb channel state. In other words, if the simulated channel
Ttotal +T nmin,i Tslot + Tdata
2(1 ) 2 state is good, the channel module would signal a
Tslot Tb received power higher than the receiver sensitivity to
= +T + (Tslot TACK Tg )
2(1 ) 2 the receiver and vice versa for bad state. The receiver
Si T Tslot would finally compare the received power against
sensitivity to drop/receive the frame. Note that we
R(Tslot TACK Tg ) Loh
(17) adopt the values of PQ BG
and Q rather than the tran-
sition probabilities to generate the Markov channel
According to (17), the expected frame latency of node states as they have realistic indication, i.e., steady
i is determined by the protocol parameters, such as T , delivery probability and channel variation speed.
Tslot , Tb , TACK , Tg and Loh , under a certain abnormal Parameters Setting. We configure a typical WBAN
monitoring context and WBAN hardware platform that has one PS and five sensor nodes [7]. The maxi-
(i.e., the traffic requirement and transmission rate is mum transmission rate of the transceivers is 220.1931
known). Since Tg = 2(2T Tslot Tb ), in this case Kbps. We set the frame transmission slot as 10 ms,
we can easily adjust the values of T , Tslot , Tb , TACK , because the deep fading of on-body channel can last
and Loh for the protocol in order to meet a specific as short as 10 ms [6]. One superframe lasts for T = 150
latency bound of that context. Note that the proposed ms. Considering the physical layer header, the length
MAC protocol is based on a Markov channel model, of a beacon frame and a complete ACK frame (includ-
where the channel state is unchanged during a frame ing Syn Info field) is set to be 32 bytes and 16 bytes,
transmission slot. Hence, the duration of a slot Tslot respectively. The overhead for synchronization, i.e.,
should be carefully set based on empirical channel the length of Syn Info field, is set to be 3 bytes. Thus
measurements, which makes Tslot improper to be the duration of transmitting a beacon frame, receiving
changed as we want. The value of Loh would also a complete ACK frame, and receiving an ACK frame
better not be changed because a stable amount of without Syn Info field can be obtained by dividing
overhead is needed for achieving protocol functions. their corresponding length by the transmission rate.
Furthermore, since the possible values of Tb and TACK Due to the constant Tslot and TACK , the duration
are relatively small, even very significant change of reserved for transmitting a data frame Tdata is dictated
these parameters will not have desirable impacts on by Tg , which is given by (9). The overhead of a frame
the latency. Therefore, we arrive at the following Loh is set to be 13 bytes. The frequency tolerance is
remark regarding MAC deployment guideline. 100 parts per million, which means the clock will lose
Remark 5: The superframe length T should be 100 time units over one million time units.
changed to achieve the latency bound of a given Regarding the QoS requirements, we assume there
context before the MAC deployment. are one normal context and four abnormal contexts,
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10

i.e., alert, semi-urgent, urgent, emergency. We config- TABLE 1


ure the data generation rate of different sensor under Data Generation Rate of Different Contexts (Kbps)
different contexts based on [7] in TABLE 1. We assume
G1 G2
the first three sensors are less relevant to this patient Contexts
Node 1 Node 2 Node 3 Node 4 Node 5
(termed as group one, G1) and their rate demands Normal 12.96 12.96 25.92 25.92 51.84
decrease w.r.t the emergency level. For example, when Alert 25.92 25.92 25.92 38.88 38.88
a patient after heart surgery undergoes a sudden heart Semi-urgent 19.44 19.44 19.44 51.84 51.84
problem, the monitor of body recovery, e.g., EMG Urgent 12.96 12.96 12.96 58.32 58.32
data, can be relaxed. This is vice versa for the other Emergency 6.48 6.48 6.48 71.28 71.28
two nodes (termed as group two, G2). We set the
threshold of delivery probability T Hi for G1 and G2
nodes as 90% and 95% (frame loss rate 10% and 5%), where F LR and F LRf ix is the frame loss rate for
respectively [7]. The default monitoring context is set the protocol under evaluation and the fixed TDMA
to be semi-urgent in order to simulate the traffic load protocol, respectively.
that is neither too heavy nor too light. The battery We first evaluate the reliability performance under
voltage, current draw, radio wakeup transition time various channel parameters. We vary the channel vari-
of nodes are based on MICAz mote datasheet [31]. ation speed Q of all nodes from a practical range [0.05
Reference Protocol. We compare the proposed to 0.5]. Note that, in this case, we only individually
MAC protocol with CA-MAC [15] introduced in Sec- choose the PQ BG
for each link in the 16 runs. We can
tion 2 and IEEE 802.15.6 MAC with beacon-enabled see from Fig. 3a that all protocols achieve a reduction
mode [2]. We simulate CA-MAC using the same of frame loss rate over the fixed TDMA and the
parameters except for several design-particular pa- proposed protocol brings the most improvement. This
rameters, which are configured to the typical values is because the proposed protocol exploits the model of
presented in [15]. For the IEEE 802.15.6 MAC im- WBAN deep fading and accordingly allocates the slots
plementation, we include contention, schedule, and via link estimation rather than blindly interleaving the
polling based access periods in the superframe struc- channel access of nodes as in the contention period of
ture. The contention period adopts CSMA/CA while CA-MAC or 802.15.6 MAC. Besides, there are a large
the schedule-based periods allow a sensor to transmit portion of schedule-based TDMA slots in CA-MAC
frames periodically. The polling periods are used to or 802.15.6 MAC, which could still cause consecutive
schedule temporary slots in current superframe in frame loss for nodes. We also see that F LRreduc of
case that retransmission or extra data is needed. the proposed protocol first lowers down and then
Results Collection. We will evaluate the system converges to a stable value with Q increasing. In the
performance versus a serial of parameters. The curve proposed protocol, we utilize the most recent channel
in each figure shows the performance versus different status to accurately estimate future channel. However,
values of the parameter of interest, while all the with a larger Q, the delivery probability of each node
other parameters are remained at the typical values approaches to PQ BG
faster in the upcoming superframe
as defined above. Each point in the figures represents no matter what the most recent link status is. This im-
the average of 16 runs that each lasts for 10000 pe- plies that the obtained link information would be less
riods of superframe and the error bar showing the useful and hence the benefit of scheduling is mitigated
standard error. In each run, we uniformly choose as Q increases. If Q continues to increase, the actual
PBG,i delivery probability would tend to approximate the
Qi and Qi for each link from the two ranges
P
[min( BG,i
PBG,i steady delivery probability PQ BG
, and the impact of
Qi ), max( Qi )] and [min(Qi ), max(Qi )], re-
spectively, in order to simulate different channel con- varying Q on the scheduling benefit becomes trivial.
ditions. From a public dataset that contains the link In contrast, if channel varies slower (smaller Q), the
measurements of WBAN over the course of several channel in the upcoming superframe would be more
days [21], PQ BG
was found to lie between 0.90 and 0.99 relevant to that of the most recent transmission and
and Q was found to lie between 0.05 and 0.5 [14]. thus slot allocation could introduce more benefits.
Details of getting the ranges can be found in [14]. However, we observe that F LRreduc of CA-MAC and
802.15.6 MAC show a different trend. This is because
a larger portion of slots may have the same channel
6.1 Reliability state with a slower-changing channel and thus the
benefits of timely spreading the transmission become
We evaluate the reliability of a protocol by measuring
slight. Furthermore, 802.15.6 MAC is slightly better
its improvement over the fixed TDMA protocol. Here
than CA-MAC since it uses polling slots to recover
we denote F LRreduc as the reduction of frame loss
some of the frame loss.
rate over the fixed TDMA protocol, i.e.,
We also evaluate the reliability metric under dif-
F LRf ix F LR ferent steady delivery probability PQ BG
(from 0.9 to
F LRreduc = (18)
F LRf ix 0.99), and show the results in Fig. 3b. Similarly, only
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11
Loss reduction over TDMA (%)

Loss reduction over TDMA (%)

Loss reduction over TDMA (%)

Loss reduction over TDMA (%)


6 16 18
Proposed protocol Proposed protocol Proposed protocol Proposed protocol
CA-MAC 14 16 CA-MAC
CA-MAC 5 CA-MAC
20 802.15.6 MAC 802.15.6 MAC
802.15.6 MAC 802.15.6 MAC 14
12
4 12
10
15
10
3 8
8
10 6
2 6
4 4
1
5 2 2
0 0 0
0 0.1 0.2 0.3 0.4 0.5 0.9 0.92 0.94 0.96 0.98 1 0 0.1 0.2 0.3 0.4 0 300 600 900 1200 1500 1800
Channel variation speed Long-term delivery probability Span of long-term delivery prob. Superframe legnth (ms)

(a) (b) (c) (d)


Fig. 3. The reduction of frame loss rate over fixed TDMA protocol of different protocols versus a) channel
variation; b) steady delivery probability; c) span of steady delivery probability; d) superframe length.

Q is individually chosen for each link in the 16 runs 18 0.35

Average node power (mW)


G1 nodes

Total sync power (mW)


Proposed protocol
in this evaluation. We can observe that the reduction 15 G2 nodes 0.3 CA-MAC
802.15.6 MAC
of frame loss rate of the three protocols stabilizes at 12
0.25

around 4%, 1% and 1.5%, respectively. From this re- 0.2


9
sult, we conclude that PQ BG
poses a negligible effect on 0.15
6
F LRreduc . It is true that the absolute value of loss rate 0.1

for both protocols may reduce with PQ BG


increasing. 3 0.05

However, the fixed TDMA can also achieve a lower 0


Alert Semi-urgent Urgent Emergency
0
0 300 600 900 1200 1500 1800
Abnormal contexts Superframe length (ms)
loss rate because PQ BG
actually defines the long-term
delivery probability. Furthermore, it is interesting to (a) (b)
notice that the loss reduction are not significant in Fig. 4. a) Average node power consumption of G1
this evaluation. In fact, it is attributed to the lack of and G2 nodes in different abnormal contexts; b) Power
diversity among the link conditions, i.e., the steady consumption for synchronization of different protocols
channel status of all links are identical. We will discuss versus superframe length.
this in the following evaluation.
According to the above observations, we now at-
tempt to explore the performance when the diversity duction of CA-MAC and 802.15.6 MAC are essentially
of link conditions increases. We fix the average PQ BG not impacted by T . As the interleaving benefits in
of each link at 0.95 while changing the span of each contention is dictated by the extent of link diversity
PBG or variation rather than superframe length, the total
Q (denoted by SP ). In other words, we uniformly
loss rate could be nearly unchanged even though the
choose the value of PQ BG
for all nodes from [0.95-SP ,
contention length may rise with T increasing.
0.95+SP ]. With a larger SP , the diversity between link
conditions would be larger. In Fig. 3c, F LRreduc grows
with SP increasing. This is because the increased 6.2 Energy Efficiency
SP enlarges the channel status diversity among all We first evaluate how the power consumption of
the links. Thereby, some nodes may possesses a PQ BG
the proposed MAC changes when the context varies.
lower than 0.95 in the fixed TDMA. Nevertheless, we In Fig. 4a, we demonstrate the average node power
can still ensure the delivery threshold for such nodes consumption of G1 and G2 nodes under different
by adopting the proposed protocol, which implies the abnormal contexts. We observe that the power of
reliability gains would rise. From these results, we G2 nodes increases as the context becomes emergent.
can conclude that the proposed protocol is especially This is due to the increasing importance of G2 data,
efficient for highly heterogeneous WBANs. which results in more assigned slots and transmission
We now evaluate the reliability when varying su- attempts for G2 nodes to meet the larger through-
perframe length T from 150ms to 1800ms. In Fig. 3d, put requirement. However, G1 nodes will reduce the
F LRreduc for the proposed protocol keeps dropping transmission and the power because G1 data becomes
down w.r.t T until a relatively stable value is reached. less useful. Such heterogeneous and dynamic power
This phenomenon is very similar to the case of larger dissipation accords with the features of WBAN.
Q shown in Fig. 3a. Given a larger T , the sensor Now we compare the power consumption for syn-
nodes would tend to deliver a frame with a proba- chronization introduced by the proposed protocol and
bility approaching PQBG
in the upcoming superframe, two reference protocols in order to validate the effec-
regardless of the channel history. Therefore, the gain tiveness of our design. We show the results in Fig. 4b.
introduced by smart scheduling turns out to be less It can be seen that the proposed protocol consumes
and eventually trivial. We also found that the loss re- the least synchronization power. This is because the
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12
Energy per kilo data bits (uJ)

Energy per kilo data bits (uJ)

Average frame latency (ms)

Average frame latency (ms)


280 360 2000
280 Proposed protocol G1 nodes sim G1 nodes sim
CA-MAC G1 nodes ana G1 nodes ana
802.15.6 MAC G2 nodes sim G2 nodes sim
276 G2 nodes ana 1500 G2 nodes ana
270 300

260 272 Proposed protocol 1000


CA-MAC
802.15.6 MAC 240
250 500
268

240
264 180 0
0 300 600 900 1200 1500 1800 0.01 0.02 0.03 0.04 Alert Semi-urgent Urgent Emergency 300 600 900 1200 1500 1800
Superframe length (ms) Span of long-term delivery prob. Abnormal contexts Superframe length (ms)

(a) (b) (a) (b)


Fig. 5. Energy consumption per kilo data bits of differ- Fig. 6. Average frame latency of G1 and G2 nodes
ent protocols versus a) superframe length; b) span of versus a) abnormal contexts; b) superframe length.
steady delivery probability.
channels. Such trend of increasing energy efficiency
proposed synchronization scheme does not have to accords with the trend of loss rate reduction with
synchronize in every superframe, which is however SP increasing. This is because the energy is primarily
required for CA-MAC and 802.15.6 MAC. We also ob- dictated by data transmission when synchronization
serve that the synchronization power of the proposed and wakeup power is fixed. The similar rationale can
protocol decreases as the superframe length increases. also be applied when PQ BG
or Q is changed.
According to (9), the guard time slot increases as T
increases, which means the proposed protocol can 6.3 Latency
tolerate a larger clock drift before resynchronization We use the time interval between the arrival time
and thus needs a less frequent synchronization. We of a frame at a sensor node and the reception time
found that the average node synchronization times of the frame at the PS to signify the frame latency.
drops from 2600 to 2507 with increasing T . Further- Since WBAN is implemented in a short range, the
more, CA-MAC and 802.15.6 MAC consume almost relatively low propagation delay is disregarded. The
the same power because they both use the periodic average latency of all successfully transmitted data
synchronization via beacon frames. frames during a simulation is used as the metric.
To further measure the energy efficiency, we also We now demonstrate that the proposed protocol
evaluate the energy consumption per kilo data bits. can achieve latency adaptivity as analyzed in (16) and
We compare the energy efficiency under a set of latency scalability as analyzed in (17), which satisfies
T in Fig. 5a. The proposed protocol outperforms the heterogeneous latency requirement of sensors in
CA-MAC and 802.15.6 MAC since it guarantees the different contexts. In Fig. 6a, we show the average
delivery probability and thus mitigates the energy frame latency of the proposed protocol when context
wastage from frame loss. However, CA-MAC and becomes more abnormal. To highlight the WBAN
802.15.6 MAC exploit random backoff mechanism, heterogeneity, we enhance the difference of nmin,i
which spoils the bandwidth usage and may incur (i.e., minimum number of allocated slots) among the
frame collisions. Besides, the synchronization over- sensors by increasing the superframe length to 300 ms.
head of the proposed protocol is also much smaller. It can be seen that the average frame latency for G1
It is interesting to note that the energy efficiency of nodes and G2 nodes increases and decreases, respec-
proposed protocol improves as T increases despite tively. This is because the proposed protocol dynami-
of its degraded reliability performance (Fig. 3d). This cally re-allocates the slots by using the context-aware
is because, with T increasing, the energy benefits adjustment of transmission duration. Thus when G2
introduced by using the proposed synchronization nodes have higher traffic requirement and more criti-
and the periodically fixed-number wakeup is greater cal delivery tasks with more emergent context, they
than the energy wastage caused by using the less will have a greater nmin,i and can transmit more
useful channel estimation. The same rationale also frames per unit time, which reduces the average
applies to the trend of CA-MAC and 802.15.6 MAC. frame latency. Similarly, some slots of G1 nodes are
We also explore how the energy efficiency is im- released when the context becomes emergent (i.e.,
pacted by varying channel parameters, i.e., PQ BG
, SP , G1 nodes traffic requirement becomes lower), which
or Q. We arrive at that the proposed protocol achieves results in the latency increase. We also observe that
a superior energy efficiency under extensive channel such a trend matches the analytical results obtained
conditions. More importantly, the curve of energy effi- from (16). Hence, the proposed protocol can properly
ciency is highly depended on the reliability curve. An switch among different contexts to handle the traffic
example for the energy efficiency with changing SP is by re-allocating the transmission duration of nodes.
demonstrated in Fig. 5b. We observe that the energy Then we proceed to evaluate the abnormal latency
per kilo data bits decreases w.r.t. the diversity among performance of the proposed protocol under different
1536-1233 (c) 2015 IEEE. Personal use is permitted, but republication/redistribution requires IEEE permission. See http://www.ieee.org/publications_standards/publications/rights/index.html for more
information.
This article has been accepted for publication in a future issue of this journal, but has not been fully edited. Content may change prior to final publication. Citation information: DOI
10.1109/TMC.2016.2549008, IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing

13

superframe length T . The monitoring context is set to

Loss reduction over TDMA (%)

Energy per kilo data bits (uJ)


18 300
emergency in order to highlight the latency differ- 16
Proposed protocol
CA-MAC
802.15.6 MAC
ence between the two priorities. As shown in Fig. 6b, 14 290
12
the average frame latency of both G1 and G2 nodes 10
280
increase as T increases. Although Tdata decreases due 8
6
to the enlarged Tg , the average length of sleep period 4 Proposed protocol
270

experienced by the sensor nodes is increased and 2


CA-MAC
802.15.6 MAC

contributes more to the total latency. Hence, according 0


5 10 15 20 25
260
5 10 15 20 25
Number of sensors Number of sensors
to (16), the average frame latency increases. We can
observe that the gap between the simulation results (a) (b)
and the analytical values increases with increasing Fig. 7. a) Reduction of frame loss rate over fixed
T . This trend attributes to fact that the number of TDMA protocol versus number of users; b) Energy
assigned slots has to adjust with a greater extent in consumption per kilo data bits versus number of users.
order to satisfy the reliability constraint in (8) under
a larger T . Thus the actual residual sleep time would
deviate greater from the approximated value in (15). WBAN apart from other wireless networks. Other
Finally, based on such monotonically and smoothly conventional reliability issues can be handled by ex-
increasing trend of latency, we are able to properly iting techniques, e.g., noisy data can be recovered by
adjust the superframe length so as to meet a specific error correction schemes.
latency bound when deploying the system. We also do not study inter-BAN interference be-
cause we would like to focus on the reliability issues
6.4 Scalability within one WBAN area. Despite its importance, a
separate full-scale study is definitely needed because
We now evaluate the system performance when the
people may have distinct movement pattern when
number of sensor nodes is varied. According to IEEE
others are around and how the inter-BAN interference
802.15.6 application summary [7], the maximum num-
would impact the deep fading is unknown.
ber of sensors among all wearable BAN applications
Markov Channel. To enhance the accuracy of
is 24. Therefore, we range the sensor number from
Markov channel model, one may introduce more
5 to 25. We also configure the same data generation
channel states. Besides, designing a online learning
rate for all nodes such that the inclusion of one new
process of model parameters might be also beneficial.
node would introduce the same level of traffic. Default
However, the proposed protocol has been shown to
values are used for all other parameters. We show
be robust against modeling inaccuracy since it shows
the results in Fig. 7. We observe that the performance
satisfactory performance in extensive channel settings.
of the proposed protocol is relatively stable. It only
Practical Issues. To realize the proposed WBAN,
shows a degradation (less loss reduction and higher
context information can be first entered into the PS.
energy per kilo bits) when the number of sensors
Then the MAC of sensor nodes will dynamically
reaches 25. This is because the slot allocation will have
configure the received sampling rate and radio sched-
less flexibility with more sensors and sometimes the
ule into the sensor hardware and wireless interface,
optimal slots of a node could be taken by another
respectively. Such level of programmability is widely
node, which leads to the sub-optimal performance.
supported in modern embedded systems. For ex-
Since WBAN does not need more sensors for wearable
ample, programmable sampling rate is implemented
applications, we believe the proposed protocol is suf-
using commercial sensors in [9].
ficiently scalable. On the other hand, the performance
of CA-MAC and 802.15.6 decrease with increasing
WBAN size since more collisions would be introduced 8 C ONCLUSIONS
in the contention period.
In this paper, we propose a QoS-driven and energy-
efficient MAC protocol to handle the technical chal-
7 D ISCUSSION lenges resulting from energy consumptions, time-
Topology. We focus on the most typical WBAN, a varying channel and context variations in WBAN.
star-topology deployment [2], and do not use multi- We are able to achieve energy-efficient delivery with
hop relaying to maintain the reliability. This is because QoS provision, by adopting the optimal slot allocation
we can ensure the reliability by carefully scheduling based on both traffic nature and channel condition.
nodes transmission without using relay. Besides, re- The energy efficiency of WBAN is further enhanced
lay could lead to additional latency and energy cost. by using the proposed synchronization scheme. The
WBAN Channel and Loss. We focus on addressing proposed protocol accomplishes more effective perfor-
the deep fading and frame loss caused by body move- mance than CA-MAC and IEEE 802.15.6 MAC under a
ment via intelligently scheduling the sensor trans- diverse set of practical settings. Furthermore, we show
mission, because this is the unique feature that sets that the proposed protocol is especially suitable to the
1536-1233 (c) 2015 IEEE. Personal use is permitted, but republication/redistribution requires IEEE permission. See http://www.ieee.org/publications_standards/publications/rights/index.html for more
information.
This article has been accepted for publication in a future issue of this journal, but has not been fully edited. Content may change prior to final publication. Citation information: DOI
10.1109/TMC.2016.2549008, IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing

14

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[11] H. Li and J. Tan, Heartbeat-driven medium-access control Bin Liu received the B.S. and M.S. degrees, both in electrical
for body sensor networks, IEEE Trans. Inf. Technol. Biomed., engineering, from University of Science and Technology of China,
vol. 14, no. 1, pp. 4451, Jan. 2010. Hefei, Anhui, China, in 1998 and 2001, respectively, and the Ph.D.
[12] S. Marinkovic, E. Popovici, C. Spagnol, S. Faul, and W. Mar- degree in electrical engineering from Syracuse University, Syracuse,
nane, Energy-efficient low duty cycle mac protocol for wire- NY, in 2006. Currently, he is an Associate Professor with the School
less body area networks, IEEE Trans. Inf. Technol. Biomed., of Information Science and Technology, University of Science and
vol. 13, pp. 915925, Nov. 2009. Technology of China. His research interests are signal processing
[13] B. Kang, J. Im, C. Chung, and J. Kim, A energy-efficient and communications in wireless sensor and body area networks.
system by reducing beacon listening for periodic vital sign Zhisheng Yan is a PhD student at Computer Science and Engi-
monitoring, in Proc. IEEE 54th International Midwest Sympo- neering Department, State University of New York at Buffalo. His
sium on Circuits and Systems (MWSCAS), Seoul, South Korea, research interests lie in perception, processing and networking of
Aug. 2011, pp. 14. multimedia data. Currently, his research is focused on energy-saving
[14] Y. Tselishchev, L. Libman, and A. Boulis, Reducing trans- mobile display and wireless HTTP adaptive streaming.
mission losses in body area networks using variable tdma Chang Wen Chen (F04) is a Professor of Computer Science and
scheduling, in Proc. 2011 IEEE International Symposium on a Engineering at the State University of New York at Buffalo, USA.
World of Wireless, Mobile and Multimedia Networks (WoWMoM), Previously, he was Allen S. Henry Endowed Chair Professor at
Jun. 2011, pp. 110. Florida Institute of Technology from 2003 to 2007, a faculty member
[15] B. Liu, Z. Yan, and C. W. Chen, CA-MAC: A hybrid context- at the University of Missouri - Columbia from 1996 to 2003 and
aware mac protocol for wireless body area networks, in at the University of Rochester, Rochester, NY, from 1992 to 1996.
Proc. 13th IEEE International Conference on e-Health Networking He has been the Editor-in-Chief for IEEE Trans. Multimedia since
Applications and Services (Healthcom), Columbia, MO, Jun. 2011, 2014. He has also served as the Editor-in-Chief for IEEE Trans.
pp. 213216. Circuits and Systems for Video Technology from January 2006 to
[16] Z. Yan and B. Liu, A context aware mac protocol for medical December 2009 and an Editor for Proceedings of IEEE, IEEE T-
wireless body area network, in Proc. 7th International Wire- MM, IEEE JSAC, IEEE JETCAS, and IEEE Multimedia Magazine. He
less Communications and Mobile Computing Conference (IWCMC and his students have received eight (8) Best Paper Awards or Best
2011), Istanbul, Turkey, Jul. 2011, pp. 21332138. Student Paper Awards and have been placed among Best Paper
[17] M. Ameen, J. Liu, S. Ullah, and K. S. Kwak, A power Award finalists many times. He is a recipient of Sigma Xi Excellence
efficient mac protocol for implant device communication in in Graduate Research Mentoring Award in 2003, Alexander von
wireless body area networks, in Proc. 2011 IEEE Consumer Humboldt Research Award in 2009, and SUNY-Buffalo Exceptional
Communications and Networking Conference (CCNC), Las Vegas, Scholar - Sustained Achievements Award in 2012. He is an IEEE
USA, Jan. 2011, pp. 11551160. Fellow and an SPIE Fellow.
1536-1233 (c) 2015 IEEE. Personal use is permitted, but republication/redistribution requires IEEE permission. See http://www.ieee.org/publications_standards/publications/rights/index.html for more
information.

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