Edinburgh Napier University

  Wireless Body Area Network (WBAN) facilitates efficient and cost-effective e-health care and well-being applications. The WBAN has unique challenges and features compared to other Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN). In addition to battery power consumption, the vulnerability and the unpredicted channel behavior of the Medium Access Control (MAC) layer make channel access a serious problem.
MAC protocols based on Time Division Multiple Access (TDMA) can improve the reliability and efficiency of WBAN. However, conventional static TDMA techniques adopted by IEEE 802.15.4 and IEEE 802.15.6 do not sufficiently consider the channel status or the buffer requirements of the nodes within heterogeneous contexts. Although there are some solutions that have been proposed to alleviate the effect of the deep fade in WBAN channel by adopting dynamic slot allocation, these solutions still suffer from some reliability and energy efficiency issues and they do not avoid channel deep fading.
This thesis presents novel and generic TDMA based techniques to improve WBAN reliability and energy efficiency. The proposed techniques synchronise nodes adaptively whilst tackling their channel and buffer status in normal and emergency contexts. Extensive simulation experiments using various traffic rates and time slot lengths demonstrate that the proposed techniques improve the reliability and the energy efficiency compared to the de-facto standards of WBAN, i.e. the IEEE 802.15.4 and the IEEE 802.15.6. In normal situations, the proposed techniques reduce packet loss up to 61% and 68% compared to the IEEE 802.15.4 and IEEE 802.15.6 respectively. They also reduce energy consumption up to 7.3%. In emergencies, however, the proposed techniques reduce packets loss up to 63.4% and 90% with respect to their counterparts in IEEE 802.15.4 and 802.15.6. The achieved results confirm the significant enhancements made by the developed scheduling techniques to promote the reliability and energy efficiency of WBAN, opening up promising doors towards new horizons and applications.