EETP-MAC: energy efficient traffic prioritization for medium access control in wireless body area networks

Abstract

Wireless body area network (WBAN) has witnessed significant attentions in the healthcare domain using biomedical sensor-based monitoring of heterogeneous nature of vital signs of a patient's body. The design of frequency band, MAC superframe structure, and slots allocation to the heterogeneous nature of the patient's packets have become the challenging problems in WBAN due to the diverse QoS requirements. In this context, this paper proposes an Energy Efficient Traffic Prioritization for Medium Access Control (EETP-MAC) protocol, which provides sufficient slots with higher bandwidth and guard bands to avoid channels interference causing longer delay. Specifically, the design of EETP-MAC is broadly divided in to four folds. Firstly, patient data traffic prioritization is presented with broad categorization including Non-Constrained Data (NCD), Delay-Constrained Data (DCD), Reliability-Constrained Data (RCD) and Critical Data (CD). Secondly, a modified superframe structure design is proposed for effectively handling the traffic prioritization. Thirdly, threshold based slot allocation technique is developed to reduce contention by effectively quantifying criticality on patient data. Forth, an energy efficient frame design is presented focusing on beacon interval, superframe duration, and packet size and inactive period. Simulations are performed to comparatively evaluate the performance of the proposed EETP-MAC with the state-of-the-art MAC protocols. The comparative evaluation attests the benefit of EETP-MAC in terms of efficient slot allocation resulting in lower delay and energy consumption.

Medium Access Control (MAC) for Wireless Body Area Network (WBAN): Superframe structure, multiple access technique, taxonomy, and challenges

“…This section classifies MAC Superframe structures into IEEE 802.15.4 [19] and IEEE 802.15.6 [20] as shown in Fig. 2.…”

“…Table 10 shows the simulation parameters list of LTDA-MAC [15], PNP-MAC [20], PLA-MAC [20], and IEEE 802. Fig.…”

“…On the arrival of emergency data, the body coordinator preempts the non-emergency data from allocated slots and assigns to emergency data [20]. The blockage and removing of non-emergency data from the allocated slots reduces the performance of MAC protocol in terms of lower data reliability with higher dropping of a patient's data, and BMSs consume more energy on the re-transmission of the lost packets.…”

Enabling Green Wireless Sensor Networks: Energy Efficient T-MAC Using Markov Chain Based Optimization

“…In effect, parameter optimization at the MAC layer provides an opportunity for energy optimization without the aforementioned shortcomings with the former two layers. Many MAC protocols have been designed for WSNs in order to use the limited energy efficiently by placing the sensor nodes in sleep mode [17]. Some of the existing MAC protocols that adopted this technique are Sensor MAC (S-MAC) [18] and Timeout MAC (T-MAC) [19].…”

Cooperative packet-forwarding strategies in mobile ad hoc networks with unreliable channels: An evolutionary game approach

“…In MANETs, the characteristics of mobile nodes determine that their energy is limited, so the design of routing protocols needs to consider reducing the energy consumption to prolong the network life. Among these energy-efficient algorithms, [26][27][28][29][30][31] Zhou et al 29 proposed a systematic solution for content delivery over ultradense networks by integrating collaboration with intelligence. In particular, a collaborative video-scheduling scheme is developed to maximize the video quality as well as the energy efficiency and spectrum efficiency.…”