Reliability and Energy Efficiency Enhancement for Emergency-Aware Wireless Body Area Networks (WBANs)

Salayma, Marwa; Al-Dubai, Ahmed; Romdhani, Imed; Nasser, Youssef

Abstract

Medium Access Control (MAC) protocols based on Time Division Multiple Access (TDMA) can improve the reliability and efficiency of WBAN. However, traditional static TDMA techniques adopted by IEEE 802.15.4 and IEEE 802.15.6 do not sufficiently consider the channel status or the buffer requirements of the nodes within heterogeneous contexts. Although there are some solutions that have been proposed to alleviate the effect of the deep fade in WBAN channel by adopting dynamic slot allocation, these solutions still suffer from some reliability and energy efficiency issues and they do not avoid channel deep fading. This paper presents two novel and generic TDMA based techniques to improve WBAN reliability and energy efficiency. Both techniques synchronize nodes adaptively whilst tackling their channel and buffer status in normal and emergency contexts. Extensive simulation experiments using various traffic rates and time slot lengths demonstrate that the proposed techniques improve the reliability and the energy efficiency compared to IEEE 802.15.4 and IEEE 802.15.6 in both situations, the normal and emergency contexts. This improvement has been achieved in terms of packet loss, up to 90% and energy consumption, up to 13%, confirming the significant enhancements made by the developed scheduling techniques.

Citation

Salayma, M., Al-Dubai, A., Romdhani, I., & Nasser, Y. (2018). Reliability and Energy Efficiency Enhancement for Emergency-Aware Wireless Body Area Networks (WBANs). IEEE Transactions on Green Communications and Networking, 2(3), 804-816. https://doi.org/10.1109/tgcn.2018.2813060

• Journal Article Type: Article
• Acceptance Date: Feb 20, 2018
• Online Publication Date: Mar 7, 2018
• Publication Date: 2018-09
• Deposit Date: Feb 21, 2018
• Publicly Available Date: Feb 22, 2018
• Journal: IEEE Transactions on Green Communications and Networking
• Print ISSN: 2473-2400
• Publisher: Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• Volume: 2
• Issue: 3
• Pages: 804-816
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1109/tgcn.2018.2813060
• Keywords: Medium Access Control (MAC) protocols, Time Division Multiple Access (TDMA), WBAN,
• Public URL: http://researchrepository.napier.ac.uk/Output/1050184