An On-Demand Emergency Packet Transmission Scheme for Wireless Body Area Networks

Sensors

Moshaddique Al Ameen²  Choong Seon Hong¹ 

[1] Department of Computer Science and Engineering, College of Electronics & Information, Kyung Hee University, Yongin-si, Gyeongggi-do 17104, Korea

关键词: body area network (BAN);    emergency;    wake up radio;    healthcare;    media access control (MAC);   

DOI  :  10.3390/s151229819

来源: mdpi

【 摘 要 】

The rapid developments of sensor devices that can actively monitor human activities have given rise to a new field called wireless body area network (BAN). A BAN can manage devices in, on and around the human body. Major requirements of such a network are energy efficiency, long lifetime, low delay, security, etc. Traffic in a BAN can be scheduled (normal) or event-driven (emergency). Traditional media access control (MAC) protocols use duty cycling to improve performance. A sleep-wake up cycle is employed to save energy. However, this mechanism lacks features to handle emergency traffic in a prompt and immediate manner. To deliver an emergency packet, a node has to wait until the receiver is awake. It also suffers from overheads, such as idle listening, overhearing and control packet handshakes. An external radio-triggered wake up mechanism is proposed to handle prompt communication. It can reduce the overheads and improve the performance through an on-demand scheme. In this work, we present a simple-to-implement on-demand packet transmission scheme by taking into considerations the requirements of a BAN. The major concern is handling the event-based emergency traffic. The performance analysis of the proposed scheme is presented. The results showed significant improvements in the overall performance of a BAN compared to state-of-the-art protocols in terms of energy consumption, delay and lifetime.

【 授权许可】

CC BY   
© 2015 by the authors; licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland.