Emergency Handling for MAC Protocol in Human Body Communication

The human body communication (HBC) is a technology that enables short range data communication using the human body as a medium, like an electrical wire. Thus it removes the need for a traditional antenna. HBC may be used as a type of data communication in body area network (BAN), while the devices are being in contact with body. One of important issues in BAN is an emergency alarm because it may be closely related to human life. For emergency data communication, the most critical factor is the time constraint. IEEE 802.15.6 specifies that the emergency alarm for the BAN must be notified in less than 1 sec and must provide prioritization mechanisms for emergency traffic and notification. As one type of BAN, the HBC must follow this recommendation, too. Existing emergency handling methods in BAN are based on the carrier sensing capability on radio frequencies to detect the status of channels. However, PHY protocol in HBC does not provide the carrier sensing. So the previous methods are not well suitable for HBC directly. Additionally, in the environment that the emergency rate is very low, the allocation of dedicated slot(s) for emergency in each superframe is very wasteful. In this work, we proposed specific emergency handling operation for human body communication's medium access control (HBC-MAC) protocol to meet the emergency requirements for BAN. We also showed the optimal number of emergency slots for the various combinations of beacon intervals and emergency rates.