Masters Thesis

Dynamic Eap Based Medium Access Control Protocol for Ieee 802.15.6 Wireless Body Area Networks

Wireless body area networks (WBANs) are networks of sensors, in the vicinity, on, or implanted within the human body and have been used for a variety of applications including medical monitoring. Due to the nature of body sensors, data transmission reliability and quality are essential factors to cope with. Furthermore, each type of the sensors is used for a patient's specific needs and its role is changing during the day. A user may have multiple combinations of different types of sensors being measured with varying significance. In order to ensure meaningful analysis, collected data should maintain the highest reliability and adaptability. However, the current standard for WBANs, IEEE 802.15.6, is static in general and cannot easily adapt to changing conditions throughout the day. The major contribution of this work is providing a dynamic Medium Access Control (MAC) protocol for WBANs that suits the unique needs of users by dynamically adjusting the allocated slots of the Exclusive Access Phase (EAP) and Random Access Phase (RAP) of the IEEE 802.15.6 beacon period (superframe) structure to fit the transmission needs of the sensors. This protocol also utilizes a packet prioritization method to minimize resource competition when contention is necessary. Another important feature of the protocol is a ranking system that considers data from both high and low priority sensors for achieving better performance.

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