Survey of Energy Efficient and Contention Based MAC Protocol in WBAN for Medical and Consumer Supply Chain Application

The authors provide an extensive survey of recent energy-efficient and contention based medium access control (MAC) protocols for wireless body area networks (WBANs). They briefed the crucial applications of WBAN in present scenario and also discussed low-power and contention based MAC protocols for medical and consumer electronics. The authors outlined the future applications of WBAN and the enhancement to be incorporated to improve the efficiency of WBAN systems. DOI: 10.4018/jgc.2012070104 52 International Journal of Green Computing, 3(2), 51-61, July-December 2012 Copyright © 2012, IGI Global. Copying or distributing in print or electronic forms without written permission of IGI Global is prohibited. and cost saving options to both health care professionals and patients. Two significant advantages are offered by WBAN compared to current electronic patient monitoring systems. The first advantage is the mobility of patients due to use of portable monitoring devices. Second advantage is the location independent monitoring facility. Being an autonomous device a WBAN node can search and find a suitable communication network to transmit data to a remote database server for storage. WBAN will also connect itself to the internet to transmit data in a non-invasive manner. As health care sector is increasingly looking for advanced ICT (Information & Communication Technology) systems to efficiently administer the healthcare delivery for a range of services advanced ICT systems will be able to deliver healthcare not only to patients in hospitals and medical centres but also in their homes and workplaces thus offering cost savings, and improving the quality of life of patients. The WBAN system is divided into three levels as shown in Figure 1. The lowest level consists of a set of intelligent sensors or nodes. These are the reduced function devise. These can only communicate with their parent device and cannot act as parent. The second level is the personal server (Internet enabled PDA, cell-phone, or home computer). These are full function devices and they can communicate with their children as well as with the external network. The third level encompasses a network of remote server which is the remote application to which data or information is transferred. A WBAN will consist of a number of tiny sensor nodes and a Gateway node used to connect to the external database server. The Gateway node could connect the sensor node to a range of telecommunication networks. These communication networks could be either a standard telephone network, mobile phone network, a dedicated medical centre/hospital network or using public WLAN (Wireless Local Area Network) hotspots also known as WiFi. A WBAN can also take advantage of widely deployed mobile data networks such as the 3G/4G data networks to transmit patient data. A WBAN could allow a user to store its collected data on his/her PDA (Personal Digital Figure 1. Data flow in an integrated WBAN 9 more pages are available in the full version of this document, which may be purchased using the "Add to Cart" button on the product's webpage: www.igi-global.com/article/survey-energy-efficientcontention-based/69998?camid=4v1 This title is available in InfoSci-Journals, InfoSci-Journal Disciplines Engineering, Natural, and Physical Science. Recommend this product to your librarian: www.igi-global.com/e-resources/libraryrecommendation/?id=2