ISRMC-MAC: Implementable Single-Radio, Multi-Channel MAC Protocol for WBANs

Wireless Body Area Networks (WBANs) have received a lot of attention as a promising technology for medical and healthcare applications. A WBAN should guarantee energy efficiency, data reliability, and low data latency because it uses tiny sensors that have limited energy and deals with medical data that needs to be timely and correctly transferred. To satisfy this requirement, many multi-radio multi-channel MAC protocols have been proposed, but these cannot be implemented on current off-the-shelf sensor nodes because they do not support multi-radio transceivers. Thus, recently single-radio multi-channel MAC protocols have been proposed; however, these methods are energy inefficient due to data duplication. This paper proposes a TDMA-based single-radio, multi-channel MAC protocol that uses the Unbalanced Star+Mesh topology to satisfy the requirements of WBANs. Our analytical analysis together experiments using real sensor nodes show that the proposed protocol outperforms existing methods in terms of energy efficiency, reliability, and low data latency.