Content-based dynamic superframe adaptation for Internet of Medical Things

Yousaf Zia,Kashif Naseer Qureshi,Arshad Farhad,Ghufran Ahmed,Faisal Bashir

doi:10.1177/1550147720907032

Abstract

IEEE 802.15.4 standard is widely used as a communication protocol by low-powered devices, including Internet of Medical Things–enabled technologies. These low-powered technologies have the ability to integrate several communicating and interacting devices for the purpose of wide range applications such as Smart homes and healthcare applications. However, the fixed superframe structure of IEEE 802.15.4 results in the unequal resource utilization among these low-powered heterogeneous Internet of Things devices. The low resource utilization degrades the network performance. In order to improve the network performance and optimum resource utilization, dynamic superframe approach is recommended. This article presents a content-based dynamic superframe adaptation algorithm for the low-powered Internet of Medical Things devices to address the resource utilization challenges. In the content-based dynamic superframe adaptation, the network coordinator dynamically adjusts the superframe along with the backoff exponent. It uses five Quality of Service metrics simultaneously: the application defined data traffic, receive ratio, Personal Area Network source nodes in numbers, number of collisions, and observed delay to achieve the optimal solution. A detailed analysis of the simulations shows that the content-based dynamic superframe adaptation is able to behave more intelligently to adjust superframe dynamic allocations according to the application’s content requirements. Moreover, it outperforms the other existing schemes in achieving the better resource utilization in IEEE 802.15.4 framework.

Highlights

The new and advanced technologies have changed the traditional way of 39 operations and almost every field of life changed into new integrated and smart technologies such as smart transportation systems,[1,2] smart health systems,[3] agriculture precision,[4,5] Internet of Things (IoT),[6,7] and Internet of Vehicles (IoV).[8]
We propose a content-based dynamic superframe adaptation (CDSA) scheme to adapt both beacon order (BO) and superframe order (SO) simultaneously based on the content requirements
A number of dynamic superframe adaptation approaches are developed. No such algorithm/approach is available as per literature survey which alters the superframe duration (SD) of IEEE 802.15.4 according to the content requirements

Summary

Introduction

The new and advanced technologies have changed the traditional way of 39 operations and almost every field of life changed into new integrated and smart technologies such as smart transportation systems,[1,2] smart health systems,[3] agriculture precision,[4,5] Internet of Things (IoT),[6,7] and Internet of Vehicles (IoV).[8]. Star topology is a suitable choice for short-range small networks such as agriculture[11] and industrial automation.[12] Star topology consists of at least one FFD referred to as PAN coordinator and connecting devices (FFDs and RFDs). The current standard recommends the use of fixed superframe structure, which is manually tuned by the network administrator during network deployment phase. It does not fulfill every application demands. In order to make it suitable for most of the applications, several approaches recommend to dynamically schedule the IEEE 802.15.4 superframe structure in beacon-enabled mode based on some traffic approximations like end-to-end latency, collision ratio (CR), occupancy ratio, number of packets received (PR) at PAN coordinator or traffic queue. A detailed analysis and discussion are described in ‘‘Performance evaluation’’ section, whereas in the last section conclusion and future research have been presented

Related work

Proposed methodology

Findings

Conclusion