An Efficient Low-Power MAC Protocol for Wireless Body Sensor Networks

The battery of a sensor node in a wireless body sensor network is small, and therefore has a short lifetime. In consequence, intensive research is being conducted on schemes to efficiently utilize the energy of a sensor node. This paper proposes a new scheme to combine a transmission power control (TPC) model, which is a technology used to heighten energy efficiency in existing body sensor networks, with a low power medium access control (MAC) protocol. This model integrates the short preamble scheme of the existing X-MAC protocol and the TPC model, by combining an early ACK packet and a transmission power control packet. Our scheme efficiently transmits data by predicting the appropriate transmission power before transmitting data packets. We experiment with a TPC algorithm, and analyze the result in order to evaluate the performance of the proposed scheme.