A cooperative medium access control protocol for mobile clusters in wireless body area networks

The advance in technologies of wireless sensor network (WSN) prompts the development of healthcare and, as a result, many wireless healthcare applications are springing up. In many scenarios, it is very common that nodes have the capability of mobility. For example, the nodes in body area networks move together with the movement of users. The MAC protocol in such applications should take the group mobility into account. We introduce a simple MAC protocol which combines TDMA and FDMA to deal with the mobile clusters in wireless sensor networks. Our solution is that the nodes are classified into two different sub-networks according to their mobility. The two sub-networks utilize different frequencies to communicate and then, through the cooperation between the two networks, the uploading of packets sensed is achieved. It is an efficient way to avoid collision and interference brought by a mobile cluster. © 2013 IEEE.