Efficient Patient Care Through Wireless Body Area Networks—Enhanced Technique for Handling Emergency Situations with Better Quality of Service

Abstract

Wireless body area networks (WBAN) is a wireless network of sensors placed in and around the human body for monitoring the patient conditions remotely. The goal of WBAN networks is to report the patient condition to the monitoring system with maximum reliability and minimum delay and deliver the life critical data in the emergency situation with utmost priority. The proposed MAC protocol is aimed at delivery of emergency packets with maximum reliability and minimum delay through the introduction of mini slots in the beacon enabled superframe for exclusive transmission of the same. To improve the packet delivery ratio of the normal packets and decrease the energy consumption of the low data rate nodes, a packet rate based scheduled slot allocation is added to this protocol. Extensive simulations show that the proposed protocol is able to achieve nearly 98% packet delivery ratio and less than 100 ms delay for emergency packets. By varying the number of allocated scheduled slots based on the packet rate of the nodes, the proposed protocol has shown improved performance in the packet delivery ratio (93%) of normal packets as compared to IEEE 802.15.6 (85%), also the energy consumption of low data rate nodes has decreased by 64%. The results show that the proposed protocol is successful in realizing much better delay and packet delivery values for emergency and normal packets.