Load adaptive and priority based MAC protocol for body sensors and consumer electronic (CE) devices

Abstract

Wireless body area network can potentially become the future of the e-health applications with the advent of technological advancements in the sensors devices and consumer electronic (CE) devices. The inclusion of CE devices in a WBAN can equip them with the capability of determining the geographical and environmental context. These contexts can then be used to make informed decisions about the criticality of sensed physiological parameters and also in carrying out data filtering and data compression. The first step towards the inclusion of CE devices in WBAN is having a MAC protocol which supports CE devices in addition to body sensors. In this paper, we have proposed a MAC protocol for WBAN, which supports body sensors devices and CE applications for remote healthcare monitoring simultaneously. Performance evaluation by simulation shows significant improvement in packet delivery ratio, average latency and energy consumption, over existing protocols.