Impact of priority differentiation on the bridged WBAN/WLAN healthcare networks

Abstract

In this work, we develop a prioritized bridging mechanism between the IEEE 802.15.6-based wireless body area networks WBANs and the IEEE 802.11e enhanced distributed channel access EDCA-based wireless local area network WLAN to convey the medical data to the medical center. We map the eight WBAN user priorities UPs into the four WLAN access categories ACs to provide the required quality of service and prioritization for the health variables generated by the WBAN nodes. By assignment of WBAN UPs with default medium access control parameters to eight different medical data streams and under the presence of ordinary nodes, we investigate the impact of WLAN AC differentiation by arbitrary inter-frame space AIFS and contention window CW on performance of medical and regular nodes' data streams. The results of this work indicate that the AC differentiation by AIFS outperforms the differentiation by CW in the sense that it does not deteriorate the end-to-end delay of relayed WBAN traffic and ordinary WLAN traffic.Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.