Reservation-Based Dynamic TDMA Protocol for Medical Body Area Networks

The medical body area network (MBAN) is an emerging technology to resolve the small area connection issues around human body, especially for the medical applications. This paper proposes a dynamic TDMA (DTDMA) protocol for MBAN with focus on the dependability and power efficiency. In DTDMA, the slots are allocated by the MBAN coordinator only to the devices which have buffered packets and released to other devices after the current allocation. Through the adaptive allocation of the slots in a DTDMA frame, the MBAN coordinator adjusts the duty cycle adaptively with the traffic load. Comparing with the IEEE 802.15.4 MAC protocol, the DTDMA provides more dependability in terms of lower packet dropping rate and less energy consumption especially for an end device of a MBAN.