The role of cross-layered designs in wireless body area network

With recent advancement, Wireless Body Area Network (WBAN) plays an important role to detect various diseases of a patient in advance and informs the medical team about the life threatening situation. WBAN comprises of small intelligent Biomedical sensors which are implanted inside patient body and attached on the surface of a patient to monitor different vital signs, namely; respiratory rate, ECG, EMG, temperature, blood pressure, glucose. The routing layer of WBAN has the same challenging problems as similarly faced in WSN but the unique challenge is the temperature-rise during monitoring of vital signs and data transmission. IEEE 802.15.6 MAC Superframe of WBAN is different from IEEE 802.15.4 MAC of WSN and provides channels to emergency and non-emergency data for transmission. As similarly seen in WSN, PHY layer of IEEE 802.15.4 and IEEE 802.15.6 provide various modulation techniques for data transmission. The purpose of this study is to familiar with routing layer, MAC layer and PHY layer in the cross-layer design of WBAN.