title: Cooperative energy harvesting-adaptive MAC protocol for WBANs.
abstract: In this paper, we introduce a cooperative medium access control (MAC) protocol, named cooperative energy harvesting (CEH)-MAC, that adapts its operation to the energy harvesting (EH) conditions in wireless body area networks (WBANs). In particular, the proposed protocol exploits the EH information in order to set an idle time that allows the relay nodes to charge their batteries and complete the cooperation phase successfully. Extensive simulations have shown that CEH-MAC significantly improves the network performance in terms of throughput, delay and energy efficiency compared to the cooperative operation of the baseline IEEE 802.15.6 standard.
authors.affiliation: Department of Electronics, University of Barcelona (UB), Barcelona 08028, Spain. volker.estevesfuentes.2013@ieee.org.
authors.forename: Volker
authors.initials: V
authors.lastname: Esteves
authors.affiliation: Department of Signal Theory and Communications (TSC), Technical University of Catalonia (UPC-BarcelonaTECH), C./ Esteve Terradas 7, C4-202P, Castelldefels 08860, Spain. angelos.antonopoulos@tsc.upc.edu.
authors.forename: Angelos
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Antonopoulos
authors.affiliation: Department of Signal Theory and Communications (TSC), Technical University of Catalonia (UPC-BarcelonaTECH), C./ Esteve Terradas 7, C4-202P, Castelldefels 08860, Spain. ellik@tsc.upc.edu.
authors.forename: Elli
authors.initials: E
authors.lastname: Kartsakli
authors.affiliation: Department of Electronics, University of Barcelona (UB), Barcelona 08028, Spain. manel.puig@ub.edu.
authors.forename: Manel
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Puig-Vidal
authors.affiliation: Department of Electronics, University of Barcelona (UB), Barcelona 08028, Spain. pmiribel@el.ub.edu.
authors.forename: Pere
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Miribel-Català
authors.affiliation: Department of Electronics, University of Barcelona (UB), Barcelona 08028, Spain. cverikoukis01@ub.edu.
authors.forename: Christos
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Verikoukis
keywords: MAC protocol design; WBANs; cooperative communications; energy harvesting