Trade-off analysis of a MAC protocol for wireless e-emergency systems

Abstract

Wireless sensor networks are envisioned to be deployed in healthcare. Since emergency and intensive care applications need to assure reliable and timely data delivery, they have increased demands for quality of service, including at the MAC layer. Amongst MAC protocols available for WSNs, the Low Power Real Time (LPRT) presents suitable characteristics to be deployed in emergency platforms due to its rational bandwidth allocation, low energy consumption, and bounded latency. Yet, this protocol may present a significant packet loss ratio in a wireless channel with bit error ratio. In order to define a MAC protocol more robust to bit error conditions and able to fulfill the required quality of service, solutions based on short size beacons and multiple retransmissions are proposed and tested. The results showed that such strategies led to meaningful improvements regarding packet loss ratio, without compromising significantly the energy consumption. © 2009 Institute for Computer Sciences, Social-Informatics and Telecommunications Engineering.