Monitoring behavior of the elderly and the disabled living alone has become a major public health problem in our modern societies. Among the various scientific aspects involved in the home monitoring field, we are interested in the study and the proposal of a solution allowing distributed sensor nodes to communicate with each other in an optimal way adapted to the specific application constraints. More precisely, we want to build a wireless network which consists of several short range sensor nodes exchanging data between them according to a communication protocol at MAC (medium access control) level that optimizes energy consumption, transmission time and loss of information. To achieve this objective, we have analyzed the advantages and the limitations of WPAN (wireless personal area network) technology and communication protocols currently used in relation to the requirements of our application. We then proposed a deterministic, adaptive and energy saving medium access method based on the IEEE 802.15.4 physical layer and a mesh topology. It ensures the message delivery time with strongly limited collision risk due to the spatial reuse of medium in the two-hop neighborhood. This proposal was characterized by modeling and simulation using the OPNET network simulator. We then implemented the proposed mechanisms on hardware devices and deployed a sensors network in real situation to verify the accuracy of the model and evaluate the proposal according to different test configurations.
