Impact of Wireless Channel Temporal Variation on MAC Design for Body Area Networks

Authors:
Athanassios Boulis;Yuriy Tselishchev;Lavy Libman;David Smith;Leif Hanlen
Affiliations:
NICTA, University of Sydney;NICTA, University of Sydney;University of New South Wales;NICTA, Australian National University;NICTA, Australian National University
Venue:
ACM Transactions on Embedded Computing Systems (TECS) - Special Section on CAPA'09, Special Section on WHS'09, and Special Section VCPSS' 09
Year:
2012

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Abstract

We investigate the impact of wireless channel temporal variations on the design of medium access control (MAC) protocols for body area networks (BANs). Our measurements-based channel model captures large and small time-scale signal correlations, giving an accurate picture of the signal variation, specifically, the deep fades which are the features that mostly affect the behavior of the MAC. We test the effect of the channel model on the performance of the 802.15.4 MAC both in contention access mode and TDMA access mode. We show that there are considerable differences in the performance of the MAC compared to simulations that do not model channel temporal variation. Furthermore, explaining the behavior of the MAC under a temporal varying channel, we can suggest specific design choices for the emerging BAN MAC standard.