A Multi-Phase SMO-Based MAC Protocol for IoT-Enabled WBAN Systems

Abstract

This paper proposes an optimised Medium Access Control (MAC) protocol to minimise the number of channel access collisions and to improve the bandwidth efficiency of IoT-based Wireless Body Area Networks (WBANs). The frame structure of the proposed MAC protocol consists of three different phases, namely Contention Phase (CP), Transmission Phase (TP), and Inactive Phase (IP). During CP, the proposed protocol prioritises the life-sensitive data. Based on allocated priority, the communicating sensor nodes (SNs) compete for channel access. During TP, the successful SNs transmit their data. We use TDMA mechanism for data transmission and Spider Monkey Optimisation (SMO) technique to improve the bandwidth efficiency of the system by selecting the best possible TDMA time slot according to the data packet size of the SNs. During IP, the SNs go into sleep mode to save energy. We simulate the scenario on MATLAB simulator. The simulation results show that the proposed SMO-MAC improves the throughput by 22.23%, 14.00%, and 17.62%, residual energy by 60.76%, 81.17%, and 124.34%, communication reliability by 70.32%, 52.60%, and 52.60%, and data packet transmission delay by 80.74%, 70.10%, and 77.40% as compared to DRT-MAC, PSO-MAC, and GA-MAC, respectively.