Battery-Dynamics Driven TDMA MAC Protocols for Wireless Body-Area Monitoring Networks in Healthcare Applications

The authors propose the cross-layer based battery-aware Time Division Multiple Access (TDMA) Medium Access Control (MAC) protocols for wireless body-area monitoring networks in wireless healthcare applications. By taking into account the joint effect of electrochemical properties of the battery, time-varying wireless fading channels, and packet queuing characteristics, the proposed schemes are designed to prolong the battery lifespan of the wireless sensor nodes while guaranteeing the reliable and timely message delivery, which is critically important for the patient monitoring networks. In addition, they develop a Markov chain model to analyze the performance of the proposed schemes.