An Effective Dynamic Slot Allocation Scheme for Wireless Body Area Network

Abstract

Wireless body area network (WBAN) is an indispensable research field in recent times, in order to monitor and transfer the lifesaving or critical data over wireless medium. One crucial challenge for WBAN is to track and sustain the Quality of Service (QoS). Another significant issue is to reduce the energy consumption within such a resource-constrained network. Due to consecutive time slots allocation, the ready nodes in the queue have to wait for a long time even it has very few or bursty data for transmission. The fixed slot assignment is not suitable for the emergency applications where nodes have different packet generation rate. Therefore, this paper introduces a novel enhanced time division multiple access (ETDMA) MAC protocol using IEEE 802.15.4 standard which dynamically allocated the time slots for body sensor nodes. The entire channels are divided into a number of time slots, in which nodes can send their control or data packets over delegated time slot. Also, the Enhanced Packet Scheduling Algorithm (EPSA) is considered to ensure the great number of lingering or waiting nodes allocated to the specified time slots in the given time frame. Since, it avoids unnecessary bandwidth usage and channel assignment. The simulation results show that the proposed method saves more energy, reduce the delay and packet loss, and employs the channel to maximum capacity.