IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON BIOMEDICAL CIRCUITS AND SYSTEMS, VOL. 2, NO.

4, DECEMBER 2008 251

Energy Efficient Medium Access Protocol for

Wireless Medical Body Area Sensor Networks
Okundu Omeni, Member, IEEE, Alan Chi Wai Wong, Alison J. Burdett, Senior Member, IEEE, and
Christofer Toumazou, Fellow, IEEE

Abstract—This paper presents a novel energy-efficient MAC chronic conditions that require ongoing clinical management
Protocol designed specifically for wireless body area sensor [1], [2]. Sensium™ is a trademark of Toumaz Technology Ltd,
networks (WBASN) focused towards pervasive healthcare appli- UK.
cations. Wireless body area networks consist of wireless sensor
nodes attached to the human body to monitor vital signs such as Vital signs monitoring using wireless sensor network tech-
body temperature, activity or heart-rate. The network adopts a nologies have previously been described, but these systems are
master-slave architecture, where the body-worn slave node peri- typically bulky and power hungry and rely on MAC protocols
odically sends sensor readings to a central master node. Unlike such as Bluetooth and 802.11 which are inefficient for such
traditional peer-to-peer wireless sensor networks, the nodes in WBASN applications [3]–[6]. More general Wireless Sensor
this biomedical WBASN are not deployed in an ad hoc fashion.
Joining a network is centrally managed and all communications
Network (WSN) MAC protocols, which have been the focus
are single-hop. To reduce energy consumption, all the sensor nodes of fairly intensive research [6], [7], [9], [10], are also not well
are in standby or sleep mode until the centrally assigned time suited to these specific biomedical WBASN applications either.
slot. Once a node has joined a network, there is no possibility of Zigbee/IEEE 802.15.4 [6] which is designed for similar net-
collision within a cluster as all communication is initiated by the works does not have sufficient ’network device’ flexibility in
central node and is addressed uniquely to a slave node. To avoid
non-beacon mode. It also lacks the cross-layer optimization fea-
collisions with nearby transmitters, a clear channel assessment
algorithm based on standard listen-before-transmit (LBT) is tures which the proposed protocol brings to this particular area.
used. To handle time slot overlaps, the novel concept of a wakeup This paper describes a novel MAC Protocol designed specif-
fallback time is introduced. Using single-hop communication ically for wireless body area sensor networks focused on perva-
and centrally controlled sleep/wakeup times leads to significant sive healthcare applications. Like other wireless sensor network
energy reductions for this application compared to more “flexible” MAC protocols, a primary design goal was low power consump-
network MAC protocols such as 802.11 or Zigbee. As duty cycle is
reduced, the overall power consumption approaches the standby tion. This is achieved through a focus on collision avoidance (a
power. The protocol is implemented in hardware as part of the primary source of energy wastage [6], [7], [9], [10]), and the use
Sensium™ system-on-chip WBASN ASIC, in a 0.13- m CMOS of centrally controlled time slotting for sensor nodes. The com-
process. plete hardware MAC also incorporates cross-layer optimization,
Index Terms—Hardware MAC, MAC Protocol, wireless body performing some ISO/OSI upper layer functions (from session
area sensor network, wireless sensor networks. layer down to PHY) at the hardware MAC layer to reduce the
power overhead of software implementations.
As a result of the network topology adopted in the MAC
I. INTRODUCTION protocol, many of the traditional problems that plague wireless
HE wireless communications revolution which is leading
T the convergence of all media and data services appears to
be gaining wide acceptance. The healthcare sector is becoming
sensor networks have been either eliminated or significantly re-
duced. Specifically, idle listening and over-hearing are not an
issue in this protocol as traffic is managed centrally. Table I
increasingly interested in using this new technology to more ef- highlights some of the key features of traditional ad hoc wire-
fectively administer healthcare delivery. In particular, wireless less sensor networks (WSN) and emerging wireless body area
vital signs monitoring is an area of modern healthcare that is sensor networks (WBASN). In the following sections, the pro-
growing very fast. This is due to its potential for slowing down posed MAC Protocol is presented in more detail, from concep-
the unsustainable growth of healthcare spending due to an in- tion to design, implementation together with measured results.
creasing number of people living for years or even decades with
II. RELATED WORK
Manuscript received December 31, 2007; revised March 12, 2008. Current
version published November 19, 2008. This work was supported in part by A. Review Stage
Toumaz Technology Ltd, Oxfordshire, U.K. This paper was recommended by
Associate Editor E. MacPherson. MAC Protocol design is a very broad research area, and a lot
O. Omeni, A. C. W. Wong, and A. J. Burdette are with the Toumaz Tech- of recent work has focused on the area of wireless sensor net-
nology Ltd, Oxfordshire OX14 4RZ, U.K. (e-mail: okundu.omeni@toumaz.
com; alan.wong@toumaz.com; Alison.burdett@toumaz.com).
works [6], [7], [9], [10]. As widely reported [6], [7], [9], [10]
C. Toumazou is with the Toumaz Technology Ltd, Oxfordshire OX14 4RZ, major causes of energy wastage in wireless sensor networks
U.K., and also the Institute of Biomedical Engineering, Imperial College are collisions, idle listening, overhearing, traffic fluctuations and
London, London SW7 2AZ, U.K. (e-mail: c.toumazou@ic.ac.uk). protocol overhead.
Color versions of one or more of the figures in this paper are available online
at http://ieeexplore.ieee.org. In the more specific area of wireless body area networks,
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/TBCAS.2008.2003431 the first three sources of wastage can be eliminated by using
1932-4545/$25.00 © 2008

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252 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON BIOMEDICAL CIRCUITS AND SYSTEMS, VOL. 2, NO. 4, DECEMBER 2008

TABLE I 6) Sensor nodes are resource constrained, i.e., they have low
COMPARING TRADITIONAL AND BODY AREA WIRELESS SENSOR NETWORKS processing power and limited memory.
7) Data from the wireless sensor nodes is forwarded to a cen-
tral master node for processing; this central node is signif-
icantly less resource and power constrained relative to the
wireless sensor nodes.
These listed attributes are the main influences leading to the
specific MAC Protocol implementation described in this paper.
These attributes also differentiate the particular application from
more generic wireless sensor network protocols, and other pro-
tocols which have been deployed in biomedical applications
such as Bluetooth, IEEE 802.11 and 802.15.4.
a master-slave architecture with time division multiple access
with clear channel assessment (TDMA/CCA) [6] network ac- B. Network Architecture
cess scheme. In a recent paper, Lamprinos et al. [11] proposed a As a result of the attributes in the previous section, a point
MAC protocol for Patient Personal Area Networks (essentially a to multi-point (star) network architecture is proposed. In this
wireless body area network application) in which a master-slave architecture, the central node acts as the master while the other
architecture is employed, whereby, to avoid idle listening, all the nodes are slaves. The slave nodes are the actual WBASN nodes
slaves have to lock onto the Rx slot of the master and go into which acquire sensor data and transmit to the central node for
standby at the same time. This approach imposes a limitation processing. Each individual master-slaves network is refereed to
on the duty cycles of the slaves on the network. Some would as a cluster. For ease of management, the maximum number of
have low duty cycle because they are serviced first while others slaves connected to a master in one cluster is 8 (many more can
would have a higher duty cycle since they are serviced later in be connected, but the time-slotting would have to be managed
the Rx slot. outside the protocol). Although it is possible to form complex
networks of a “central master” with other masters, this paper
III. MAC PROTOCOL DESIGN concentrates on the protocol as it relates to one cluster.
The main goal of the proposed MAC Protocol is to reduce Also in this architecture, the network access is clear channel
power consumption from sources like idle listening, overhearing assessment [3], [6] and collision avoidance with time division
and collision. multiplexing (CCA/TDMA). This network access scheme sig-
The closest existing MAC Protocol to the one presented is nificantly reduces the likelihood of collision and idle listening,
IEEE 802.15.4 [6], however it had 3 differences which were not leading to significant power savings. In addition time-slot al-
well suited to this specific application. location is dynamically controlled by the master, so a slave
1) Data reliability isn’t handled in the MAC layer. time slot could be changed every time it communicates with the
2) Multiple communication modes increase the complexity of master. This enables the system to better cope with fluctuating
implementation. Hence, this new scheme is easily imple- traffic.
mented in hardware. The penalty is increased complexity of the central node. How-
3) Time-slotting is limited (16 slots in a super frame) and ever, this is not a major problem because the central node is
must all be equally spaced expected to have significantly more power and processing re-
Before describing the MAC Protocol, assumptions about sources. The key idea used in this network architecture is to
wireless body area networks are outlined. move much of the network and protocol complexity away from
the power constrained wireless sensor nodes and into the much
A. Attributes of Wireless Body Area Sensor Networks more capable central node.
This network topology is shown in Fig. 1. To accommodate
In specifying this MAC Protocol, the following attributes can
for intercommunication between clusters, access to an IP net-
be inferred about the wireless body area sensor network.
work may be used. This way complex network structures can
1) All wireless sensor nodes are attached to the body.
still be built which extend wide areas.
2) The data being monitored is of low frequency
3) The network does not need to respond immediately to
C. Basic Operation
changes (can be inferred from 2).
4) Sensors monitor a range of vital signs which are typically The proposed MAC protocol operations are based on three
at a low data rate kB e.g., Temperature, pressure or main communication processes. The first is when a wireless
heart-rate reading. However some higher data rate applica- sensor node wants to join a cluster. This is called the Link
tions must also be catered for, such as streaming of elec- establishment process. The second is when a slave and master
trocardiogram (ECG) signals. wake-up after an assigned sleep period. This is called the
5) The nodes are miniature, battery powered and need to wakeup service process. The last process is an exception
run ideally for days from very low capacity batteries such process which occurs when a slave urgently wants to send
as flexible printed battery technologies or miniature coin information to the cluster master. This is called an Alarm
cells. process. In all three processes, communication can only be

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OMENI et al.: ENERGY EFFICIENT MEDIUM ACCESS PROTOCOL FOR WIRELESS MEDICAL BODY AREA SENSOR NETWORKS 253

master without waiting for its next wake-up. This alarm con-
dition may be due to an out of bounds measurement (of say
body temperature or blood glucose level) or a “sensor memory
overflow” alert. When this mode is enabled, the master contin-
uously sends out a request to all the slave addresses on the net-
work sequentially. The slave listens for its address and commu-
nicates the alarm condition when it receives it. This only hap-
pens when the master is not busy servicing a scheduled wakeup,
and would be terminated when a slave wake-up needs to be ser-
viced. [Fig. 2(c)].
All three communication processes described above are illus-
trated in Fig. 2(a)–(c).

Fig. 1. Proposed MAC Protocol Network topology (S = Slave Node, M = D. Wakeup Fallback Time
Master node).
The central management of time slotting can be a complex
task for the master especially when complicated by the occur-
rence of sporadic alarm conditions. To ensure that every sensor
initiated by the master. In addition only one slave can join the
slave node maintains a guaranteed time slot [6] even if another
network at a time as the network is non- ad hoc.
slave flags an alarm condition, the novel concept of wakeup
1) Link Establishment: When a master node is first enabled,
fallback time (WFT) is proposed. If a slave wakes up and fails
it continuously tries to establish a link with unattached slave
to communicate with the master (either because it is busy ser-
nodes. It does this by first scanning for a vacant RF channel.
vicing an alarm, or the channel is temporarily occupied by an
When it finds one, it remains on that channel and starts sending
interferer), it goes back to sleep with a sleep time set by the
out a beacon containing a unique address and configuration for
WFT. During this time it continues to buffer the sensor data.
a slave and then listening for a fixed time for a response. The
After the WFT, it wakes up and searches for the master again.
sum of the master’s beacon transmit and listen time is termed
Similarly, if the master is unable to communicate with the slave
. Alternatively, when a slave node is enabled, it also scans
at the wakeup time, it also defaults to the WFT. Hence, both
the available RF channels to find the master beacon. If a channel
master and slave wakeup at the common WFT and commu-
is vacant for , it hops to the next one. If it is occupied, it
nicate, restoring the schedule. The WFT is a programmable
listens for fixed period for preamble from the master
parameter and is a fraction of the shortest sleep time on the
beacon and if it doesn’t receive it, it moves on again to the next
network to mitigate continuous time-slot collisions. Also it is
channel. Once the beacon is received, it responds with an ac-
global to the network and originally set by the master during
knowledgement to the master. The master node then assigns a
the link establishment process. This scheme ensures that time
sleep time and ends the transaction. At the end of the link estab-
slot overlaps are seamlessly managed and do not degrade the
lishment process, the slave has a unique address, configuration
network in the long run. Also it allows a slave with a long sleep
information and sleep time [Fig. 2(a)]. Subsequent additions to
time more opportunities to communicate its data to the master
the network have to be specifically initiated (e.g., by software)
without having to wait for the whole sleep-time again.
on the master. After Link establishment, the RF channel of com-
munication is fixed and can only be changed by higher layer in-
E. Cross Layer Functionality
tervention.
2) Wakeup Service: After link establishment, both master When a data packet transmission fails, the MAC automati-
and slave sleep timers start to count up to the sleep time. Hence, cally retries a programmable number of times before dropping
they both wake-up at about the same time, the difference in the packet. In addition large packets can be automatically broken
wake-up times determined by the offsets between both timers in to smaller frames and transmitted one at a time. The protocol
and the length of the sleep time. On wake-up, the master in- also provides for the receiver to reassemble the fragmented data
terrogates the slave which alternatively listens. It (master) may packets as they are received. One additional function provided
simply request for its (slave’s) sensor data, or request status in- is the control of the frequency and rate of sensor data acquisi-
formation. Whatever the communication, a new sleep time is as- tion depending on the application.
signed to the slave, setting the next wakeup time-slot [Fig. 2(b)] These functions are usually handled by higher layers in the
To mitigate long-term time-slot drift between the master and ISO/OSI protocol stack. In this protocol, hardware implemen-
slaves in a cluster, there is an optional synchronization phase tation directly at the MAC layer is preferred as significant power
during every communication when the slave can synchronize savings over software implementations is achieved. This is be-
its timer to that of the master. The master’s timers never change. cause the processor would normally need to run continuously
This dynamic time-slotting does not in any way preclude the use (significantly increasing standby power) to perform these func-
of the protocol in a fixed time-slotting application. It just offers tions like determining when to take the next sensor reading, how
this added functionality which may be used if required. many should be taken and when to switch to another sensor.
3) Alarm: If the slave detects an “alarm condition” while per- Also the delay involved in communicating through the protocol
forming some local processing, it may communicate with the stack layers is eliminated [12].

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254 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON BIOMEDICAL CIRCUITS AND SYSTEMS, VOL. 2, NO. 4, DECEMBER 2008

Fig. 2. Stages in the 3 processes. (a) Link establishment. (b) Wakeup servicing. (c) Alarm processing.

IV. MAC PROTOCOL IMPLEMENTATION

A. Implementation Platform—Sensium™
Following detailed system modeling, the MAC Protocol was
implemented as a key part of a custom system-on-chip (SoC)
ASIC for biomedical WBASN applications. This mixed-signal
SoC, known as Sensium™, integrates a half-duplex transceiver,
programmable sensor interface circuitry and a digital block con-
taining the hardware MAC plus a low power 8051 microcon-
troller integrated with 32 kB of code and 32 kB of data memory.
The data memory is directly accessible via a DMA controller Fig. 3. Sensium™ System on chip block diagram.
by both the Sensor Interface ADC (to write sensor readings)
and by the hardware MAC (to read/write sensor readings for
direct transmission/reception). Having direct access to system and so it is freed up to handle higher layer functions or transfer-
memory allows the slave devices to operate entirely without pro- ring acquired data to a PC for further processing. Which blocks
cessor intervention. The processor can therefore be switched to a are active in a given mode is controlled by the power man-
low clock frequency and used to service irregular events like link agement unit. The Sensium™ system block diagram is shown
errors. On the master, processor intervention is also minimal, below in Fig. 3.

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OMENI et al.: ENERGY EFFICIENT MEDIUM ACCESS PROTOCOL FOR WIRELESS MEDICAL BODY AREA SENSOR NETWORKS 255

TABLE II From the above analysis, it has been shown that the duty
TYPICAL APPLICATION REQUIREMENTS cycle in continuous monitoring applications like ECG is af-
fected mainly by the communication symbol rate.
Table II illustrates this using typical numbers for 3 important
applications. For spot measurement applications, we can reduce
duty cycle by increasing the sleep time because more payload
data means that the overhead time becomes less significant and
(3) approaches (4). This is however not the case for continuous
monitoring applications like ECG as the amount of sensor data
must increase with sleep time. For applications like this, the
sleep time is usually limited by the system memory resources
available for storing the sensor data. Fig. 4 shows the graphs of
obtained by plotting (1) and (2) for a temperature sensing ap-
plication. The payload size was kept fixed; while the sleep time
was changed (which means that sampling interval was spread
evenly over the chosen sleep time which is acceptable since the
data is significantly more than required as shown in Table II). It
can be concluded from the plot that the power is dependent on
the sleep time (4a) as well as the number of retransmissions (4b).
Fig. 4(b) also shows that the power consumption approaches the
The physical layer for the radio operates in the 870/900 MHz standby power as sleep time increases
SRD/ISM bands, employing FSK modulation with 50 KHz de-
viation to give an over air bit rate of 50 kbps [13]. The sensor in-
terface block features sensor driving and interface circuitry for a
range of biomedical sensors, and includes a 10-bit, 50–500 Hz
sampling rate DSM-ADC [14]. For error control, an (11, 15)
hamming code is implemented in the MAC hardware together
with CRC frame checking. This provides 2 levels of error cor-
rection and detection.

B. Mac Complexity
The entire Hardware MAC protocol, including the error
control and framing block, was under 12 K-gates for the slave
and K-gates for the master. The gate count of the hard-
ware implementations points to the simplicity of the protocol.
Since no hardware implementations of 802.15.4 were found,
we compared the software implementations of both protocols.
The proposed protocol can be implemented in around 16 kB of
code (including application code) while 15.4 would require at
least 32 kB. The power consumption for this implementation
is around 500 W while it is 15.4 is 10 mW [15], [16]. This
(1)
is because of the difference in clock frequency required to run
both protocols. This protocol can be run on an
The general equation for average power is
C. System Power and Duty Cycle Analysis
(2)
The average power consumption is dependent on the duty
cycle of operation. So even though a sensor node has a very Expading the DC equation further, we have
long sleep time, but also has a long active time, the duty cycle
would be high and hence average power. This can be computed
for spot measurement applications like for temperature and glu-
cose and also for continuous monitoring applications like ECG.
Table II gives compares common applications. (3)
A detailed analysis of the relationships between the parame-
ters that affect duty cycle and average power computation fol- Fir spot measurement applications, is significant because
lows. of the small data payload and hence cannot be ignored.

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256 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON BIOMEDICAL CIRCUITS AND SYSTEMS, VOL. 2, NO. 4, DECEMBER 2008

Fig. 4. Power consumption. (a) Compared with sleep time. (b) Compared with sleep time and number of retransmissions.

Fig. 6. Duty cycle versus symbol rate plot using (4).

Fig. 5. Duty cycle versus sleep time plots using (3) with number of retries set
to 0, 1, and 9. applications, the duty cycle would determine the time slot allo-
cations to the slave devices in a cluster network and ultimately
limits how many can be supported. Hence, network scalability is
However for continuous monitoring applications like ECG, mainly application dependent. For example, the ECG example
where the payload bits are frame overhead bits, above in Table II can support a maximum of 8 slave node be-
and so becomes insignificant. Equation (3) then be- cause of the 8% duty cycle. However in practice this would be
comes kept to 6 to allow for possible retransmissions. Also an applica-
tion like blood glucose monitoring (0.0014% duty cycle) could
(4) have up 255 slave nodes which is the maximum number that can
be supported by the master node.
The transmit time for the data payload is 40 ms ( 100 sam-
D. Measured Results
ples), giving a typical duty cycle (for 1 sec sleep time) of 4%.
The majority of target applications however have much longer The fabricated chip was mounted on a demo board with other
sleep times, so the duty cycle would be much smaller and hence interfaces for SPI, UART and USB as well as a bread boarding
lead to greater power savings. area for connecting the application sensors. The constructed
A more realistic plot is shown below for (3) in Fig. 5. Here demo board is shown below in Fig. 7. Table III below gives the
the typical numbers from Table II are used. The plot shows that component and system standby and active power with a 1 V
as sleep time increases, the duty cycle decreases, quickly con- supply. These are actual measured current consumptions from
verging even for 9 retries. the fabricated PCB including the sensor currents for body tem-
In the case of an ECG streaming application, the duty cycle perature sensing and ECG streaming applications. As shown in
is fixed by the Transmit/Receive symbol rate. Fig. 6 is a plot of Table III, there are 3 power states; active, sleep/standby and deep
duty cycle versus symbol rate for this implementation (4). In all sleep. In active mode, all the blocks are turned on. For sleep

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OMENI et al.: ENERGY EFFICIENT MEDIUM ACCESS PROTOCOL FOR WIRELESS MEDICAL BODY AREA SENSOR NETWORKS 257

0
Fig. 8. Transmit power ( 10 dBm) pie chart. The MAC Protocol power is
about 1% of the total power.

Fig. 7. Application demonstration board photo [18].

TABLE III
POWER CONSUMPTION TABLE FOR SENSIUM™ SOC

Fig. 9. Bar chart comparing battery power requirements for different wireless
standards with this work [19]–[21].

One of the observations from measurements is that on av-

TABLE IV
POWER MANAGEMENT UNIT MODES
erage, the number of retries is very low , but ultimately
depends on the agility of the radio when there is relative move-
ment between the communicating nodes. In addition, the overall
measured packet error rate is 0.04%. This is however detectable
using CRC and so the data can be retransmitted at a later com-
munication. All performance measurements used a dipole an-
tenna with both master and slave nodes stationary.
Also the separation distance was 5 meters and RF transmit
power was 10 dBm.

E. Comparing With Existing Systems

The power consumption of this work compared with other
systems is bar charted in Fig. 9. One of the key differences that
comes out of this is that the RF power requirement is signif-
icantly lowest for this work. This makes it possible for much
smaller batteries like flexible-thin or zinc-air which cannot be
used for any of the other standards. It is concluded that power
is the penalty these protocols pay for their generality. A propri-
etary protocol like the one presented can be tailored to a specific
mode, the 16 MHz clock is turned off, but the sensor interface application area to achieve much reduced power requirements.
remains on. It can also be argued that the required generality can be pro-
The sensor interface and 16 MHz clock are turned off in deep vided at the master, which can interface to the wider communi-
sleep which is the lowest power mode. In all the modes, the cation network as shown in Fig. 1.
MAC timers remain active as they control when to enter or exit
the different power modes. V. CONCLUSION
These are run off a separate 32 kHz XTAL. So the power This paper presents a new energy-efficient MAC Protocol tar-
consumption of the digital block is significantly reduced. On geted at wireless body area sensor networks focused on perva-
wake-up, the clocks are turned on again. Table IV illustrates sive healthcare applications. The protocol exploits the attributes
these power modes and the states of all the blocks. of this type network to implement a very low power architecture
The relative power contributions is illustrated in Fig. 8 where which is still capable of fast reaction to sporadic Alarm events.
the transmit power pie-chart is shown. The novel concept of ’wakeup fallback’ time is also presented

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258 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON BIOMEDICAL CIRCUITS AND SYSTEMS, VOL. 2, NO. 4, DECEMBER 2008

as a means of reducing the complexity of time-slot management [16] C. Bauman, “Picking the right 802.15.4/ZigBee wireless connection
in the presence of link failures resulting from Alarm events or for your embedded design: Part 2 Jun. 2006 [Online]. Available: http://
www.embedded.com/columns/ technicalinsights/189500078
other interference. The MAC has been implemented as part of [17] P. Hamilton, “Open source ECG analysis,” in Proc. IEEE Conf.
a larger SoC (Sensium™), and measured results have validated Comput. Cardiol., Sep. 22–25, 2002, pp. 101–104.
[18] Sensium™ Hardware Development Kit, Toumaz Technology
the effective operation of the new MAC protocol. Ltd, Oxfordshire, U.K., Jun. 2008 [Online]. Available: http://
www.toumaz.com/products/tz1030%20Sensium%20Develop-
ment%20Kit%20Product%20Brief%20V1_2.pdf
[19] CC2520 ZigBee RF Transceiver Texas Instruments, Dallas, Dec 2007
ACKNOWLEDGMENT [Online]. Available: http://focus.ti.com/lit/ds/symlink/cc2520.pdf
[20] STLC2500D Bluetooth SoC Datasheet ST Microelectronics, Geneva,
Switzerland, Jan. 2008 [Online]. Available: http://www.st.com/ston-
The authors would like to thank O. Eljamaly, M. Key, D. line/products/promlit/pdf/br2500d0108.pdf
Arachchige, and D. Clarke of Toumaz Technology Ltd. for cir- [21] STLC4560D IEEE 802.11b/g SoC Datasheet ST Microelec-
tronics, Geneva, Switzerland, Jan. 2008 [Online]. Available:
cuit design and application testing contributions and Infineon http://www.st.com/stonline/products/literature/bd/14302/stlc4560.pdf
Technologies, Munich and Xi’an for support with digital syn-
thesis and integration. The contributions through useful discus-
sions with D. McDonagh of Toumaz Technology Ltd are also
acknowledged.

Okundu Omeni (M’02) received the B.Sc. degree in

computer engineering from the Obafemi Awolowo
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munications Workshops, Mar. 2006, p. 5.
[5] “Specification of the Bluetooth System: Core,” Bluetooth SIG Inc,
2001 [Online]. Available: http: //www.bluetooth.org/ Alan Chi Wai Wong (M’03) received the M.Eng.
[6] Standard for Telecommunications and Information Exchange Between (hons.) degree in engineering science from Christ
System—Local Area Metropolitan Area Networks—Specific require- Church College, University of Oxford, U.K., in
ments—Wireless Medium Access Control(MAC) and Physical Layer 1997.
(PHY) Specifications for Low Rate Wireless Personal Area Networks In 1996, he was a Research Assistant with the
(WPAN) 2003, IEEE Std. 802.15.4-2003. Robotics Research Group at Oxford University.
[7] W. Ye, J. Heidemann, and D. Estrin, “An energy-efficient MAC pro- Between 1997 and 1998 he was with Tokyo Electron
tocol for wireless sensor networks,” in Proc. IEEE 21st Ann. Joint Conf. Ltd. working on CMOS thermal processing. From
IEEE Comput. Commun. Soc., 2002, vol. 3, pp. 1567–1576. 1998 to 2004 he was with Sony Semiconductor
[8] T. v. Dam and K. Langendoen, “An adaptive energy-efficient MAC designing wireless transceivers for mobile handset
protocol for wireless sensor networks,” in Proc. 1st Int. Conf. Em- markets. Since 2004, he has been with Toumaz
bedded Netw. Sens. Syst., 2003, pp. 171–180. Technology Ltd., Oxfordshire, U.K., developing ultralow power wireless
[9] I. E. Lamprinos, A. Prentza, E. Sakka, and D. Koutsouris, “Energy- transceivers and SoCs for biomedical applications.
efficient MAC protocol for patient personal area networks,” IEEE Eng. Mr. Wong is a Chartered Engineer (C.Eng.) and a member of the Institution
Med. Biology Soc., vol. 2005, no. 2005, pp. 3799–3802, 2005. of Engineering and Technology (MIET), both in the U.K.
[10] W. Y. J. Heidemann, “Medium access control in wireless sensor net-
works,” Univ. Southern Calif., Inf. Sci. Inst., Oct. 2003, USC/ICI Tech.
Rep. ISI-TR580.
[11] K. Langendoen and G. Halkes, “Efficient medium access control,” in Alison J. Burdett (M’91–SM’00) received the
Embedded Systems Handbook, R. Zurawski, Ed. Boca Raton, FL: B.Eng. and PhD. degrees in electrical and electronic
CRC Press, 2005. engineering from Imperial College London, U.K., in
[12] I. F. Akyildiz, M. C. Vuran, and O. B. Akan, “A cross-layer protocol 1986 and 1992, respectively.
for wireless sensor networks,” in Proc. IEEE 40th Ann. Conf. Inf. Sci. From 1992 to 1994 she worked as an Integrated
Syst., Mar. 22–24, 2006, pp. 1102–1107. Circuit Design Engineer for GEC-Plessey Semicon-
[13] A. C. W. Wong, G. Kathiresan, C. K. T. Chan, O. Eljamaly, and A. ductors, on the design of low-voltage, low-power
J. A. Burdett, “1 V wireless transceiver for an ultra-low-power SoC paging receivers. In 1994, she joined the Department
for biotelemetry applications,” in Proc. 33rd Eur. Solid State Circuits of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Imperial
Conf., Sep. 2007, pp. 127–130, ESSCIRC 11-13. College, London, U.K., as Senior Lecturer in Ana-
[14] D. McDonagh, O. Eljamaly, and A. Burdett, “1 V 14 W switched- logue Circuit Design. In 2001, she left Imperial
opamp delta sigma ADC for bioelectric data aquisition,” in Proc.4th College to co-found Toumaz Technology Ltd, Oxfordshire, U.K., where she is
IEEE/EMBS ISSS-MDBS , Aug. 2007, pp. 147–150. currently Director of Technology. She has published over 50 refereed technical
[15] CC2430 True SoC Solution for ZigBee, Texas Instruments, publications and holds 10 patents.
Dallas, 2007 [Online]. Available: http://focus.ti.com/lit/ds/sym- Dr. Burdett is a Chartered Engineer and a Fellow of the Institute of Engi-
link/cc2430.pdf neering and Technology (FIET).

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OMENI et al.: ENERGY EFFICIENT MEDIUM ACCESS PROTOCOL FOR WIRELESS MEDICAL BODY AREA SENSOR NETWORKS 259

Christofer Toumazou (M’87–SM’99–F’01) re- Prize award, and the IEE Raleigh book award for his work on current-mode
ceived the Ph.D. degree from Oxford-Brookes signal processing. He has served on the Board of Governors of the IEEE CAS
University in collaboration with UMIST, Man- Society and also as VP for Technical activities from 1996 to 1999. He is an
chester, U.K., in 1986. Advisor to many healthcare panels, including the Singapore Government in the
He is Professor of Circuit Design and Founding field of medical devices. He is a Senior Advisor to the Board of Grace Semi-
Executive Director and Chief Scientist of the Insti- conductor, Taiwan, R.O.C., one of the largest Semiconductor Foundries in the
tute of Biomedical Engineering at Imperial College World and Senior Advisor to Advanced Nanotech Inc. He was a member of
London, U.K. His research interests include high the U.K. foresight committee on a report for infectious diseases as well as a
frequency analogue integrated circuit design for RF member of the UK MOD Defence Strategic Advisory Committee on critical
electronics and low-power electronics for biomedical technologies. He is also Editor-in-Chief of the IETs Electronics Letters. He
applications. He has published over 320 research was invited to deliver the 2003 Royal Society Clifford Patterson prize Lecture,
papers in the field of RF and low power electronics. He holds 23 patents in entitled “The Bionic Man”, for which he received The Royal Society Clifford
the field many of which are now fully granted PCT. He is the founder and Patterson bronze medal. He was awarded the 2005 IEEE CAS Society Educa-
Chairman of four technology based companies with applications spanning ultra tion Award for pioneering contributions to telecommunications and biomedical
low-power mobile technology and wireless monitors (Toumaz Technology circuits and systems, Fellowship of the IEEE and in 2006 the Membership of
Ltd, UK), biomedical devices (Applied Bionics PTE, Singapore), Digital Europea Academia. Chris was also awarded the 2007 UK Royal Academy of
Audio Broadcasting (Future-Waves Pte Taiwan) and DNA Sequencing (DNA Engineering Silver Medal for his contributions to Industry.
Electronics Ltd, UK).
Prof. Toumazou is recipient of the 1992 IEEE Circuits and Systems (CAS)
Society outstanding Young Author Award, the 1995 IEE Electronics Letters

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