• Journal of the Korea Institute of Information and Communication Engineering
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• v.19 no.2
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• pp.323-335
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• 2015

Mobile healthcare is a fusion of information technology and biotechnology and is a new type of health management service to keep people's health at anytime and anywhere without regard to time and space. The WBAN(Wireless Body Area Network) technology that collects bio signals and the data analysis and monitoring technology using mobile devices are essential for serving mobile healthcare. WBAN consisting of users with mobile devices meet another WBAN during movement, WBANs transmit data to the other media. Because of WBAN conflict, several nodes transmit data in same time slot so a collision will occur, resulting in the data transmission being failed and need more energy for re-transmission. In this thesis, we proposed a MAC protocol for WBAN with mobility to solve these problems. First, we proposed a superframe structure for WBAN. The proposed superframe consists of a TDMA(Time Division Muliple Access) based contention access phase with which a node can transmit data in its own time slot and a contention phase using CSMA/CA algorithm. Second, we proposed a network merging algorithm for conflicting WBAN based on the proposed MAC protocol. When a WBAN with mobility conflicts with other WBAN, data frame collision is reduced through network reestablishment. Simulations are performed using a Castalia based on the OMNeT++ network simulation framework to estimate the performance of the proposed superframe and algorithms. We estimated the performance of WBAN based on the proposed MAC protocol by comparing the performance of the WBAN based on IEEE 802.15.6. Performance evaluation results show that the packet transmission success rate and energy efficiency are improved by reducing the probability of collision using the proposed MAC protocol.