Recently wireless body area network (WBAN) draws more and more attentions because of its benefits especially in health monitoring. As the sensor nodes in WBAN are battery-powered, energy efficiency is the top concern in the medium access control (MAC) protocol design. Therefore, in this paper, we propose an Enhanced MAC (EMAC) protocol which integrates relay with dynamic power control mechanism to save energy consumption. On one hand, the protocol selects a relaying node for the node which may be energy shortage to prolong its lifetime, and then the network topology is switched from one-hop to multi-hop. Accordingly, the superframe structure is modified. On the other hand, for further energy saving, dynamic power control algorithm is performed whenever sensor nodes have data packets to transmit. Performance evaluations are conducted and the simulation results show that the EMAC significantly prolongs the network lifetime compared with IEEE 802.15.4 MAC.
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