Wireless body area networks MAC protocol for energy efficiency and extending lifetime

Wireless body area networks (WBANs), as an important part of the Internet of things and sensor networks, are becoming more important in health monitoring and entertainment services. The sensor nodes in these applications need to transmit information data to personal station and receive control information from personal station to adjust working modes. However, unlike an easily rechargeable personal station, body sensor nodes suffer from energy shortages, which affect the nodes' lifetimes. To solve this problem, we design a novel medium access control (MAC) layer protocol to enhance the energy efficiency and extend the lifetime of body sensor nodes in WBANs. The proposed protocol utilizes a hybrid scheme by taking advantage of carrier-sense multiple accesses with the collision avoidance and time division multiple access schemes. In addition, we allocate the main transmission overhead at the personal station side and design a novel awaiting order state for sensor nodes to improve energy efficiency. Also, the analysis and simulation results demonstrate that the proposed protocol can provide a 6% to 15% decrease in energy consumption from other protocols.