PAP: Priority Aware Protocol for Healthcare Applications in Wireless Body Area Network

Abstract

Wireless Body Area networks (WBANs) are among the emerging research areas that supports healthcare applications. These are getting popular as they provide features like flexibility, mobility and real-time monitoring. But due to this real time monitoring and criticality of data, WBAN requires a highly secure and reliable communication. Further, the medical emergency requires the instant information while the regular activity can’t be ignored. Therefore, this paper has proposed a reliable and optimized protocol, namely, Priority Aware Protocol (PAP) for WBAN. It transfers the data efficiently based on the priority of the data. PAP associates two priority values with each node i.e. fixed priority and dynamic priority. Fixed priority is computed according to the task assigned to the node while dynamic priority is computed on the basis of the data sensed by the node. The performance of proposed protocol has been compared with existing state of art techniques like DPPH, HOCA and IEEE 802.15.4 standard on the basis of throughput and end-to-end delay. The results show that the proposed PAP outperforms existing techniques.