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HEH-BMAC: Hybrid polling MAC protocol for WBANs operated by human energy harvesting

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Abstract

This paper introduces human energy harvesting medium access control (MAC) protocol (HEH-BMAC), a hybrid polling MAC suitable for wireless body area networks powered by human energy harvesting. The proposed protocol combines two different medium access methods, namely polling (ID-polling) and probabilistic contention access, to adapt its operation to the different energy and state (active/inactive) changes that the network nodes may experience due to their random nature and the time variation of the energy harvesting sources. HEH-BMAC exploits the packet inter-arrival time and the energy harvesting rate information of each node to implement an efficient access scheme with different priority levels. In addition, our protocol can be applied dynamically in realistic networks, since it is adaptive to the topology changes, allowing the insertion/removal of wireless sensor nodes. Extensive simulations have been conducted in order to evaluate the protocol performance and study the throughput and energy tradeoffs.

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Acknowledgments

This work has been funded by the research projects CO2Green (TEC2010-20823), WSN4QoL (PIAP-GA-2011-286047), ENIAC ARTEMOS (EUI2010-04252 and EUI2011-4349) and Grant SENACYT-IFARHU (270-2009-173).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Telecommunications Technological Centre of Catalonia (CTTC), Castelldefels, Barcelona, Spain

    Ernesto Ibarra, Angelos Antonopoulos & Christos Verikoukis

  2. Signal Theory and Communications Department, Technical University of Catalonia (UPC), Barcelona, Spain

    Elli Kartsakli

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  1. Ernesto Ibarra
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  4. Christos Verikoukis
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Correspondence to Ernesto Ibarra.

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Ibarra, E., Antonopoulos, A., Kartsakli, E. et al. HEH-BMAC: Hybrid polling MAC protocol for WBANs operated by human energy harvesting. Telecommun Syst 58, 111–124 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11235-014-9898-z

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