Improved MAC protocol for emergency handling in WBAN

Abstract

Increase in average lifespan and aging population with increase in chronic diseases, there is need to monitor patient health status anywhere both in hospital and out of hospital. This demands more advance health care technology. Due to tremendous growth in sensor technology, the healthcare applications are increasing by manifolds. These opportunities have initiated many research proposals under healthcare domain. Due to its widespread requirement, sensor technology has subset into a category called Wireless Body Area Network (WBANs). These applications are devised to take care of emergency requirements to help the person to handle emergency health issue. To overcome this research problem, many research studies are going on and some already presented. Medium Access Control (MAC) for emergency handling, recently proposed Extended Period and Mixed Period (MPEP) approach overcome the problems associated with 802.15.4 protocol. The MPEP approach is based on superframe structured MAC protocols by considering the contention free period (CFP) allocations. However the problem with this method is inefficient slot allocation technique which may leads to delay in emergency handling in WBAN. To overcome this problem, in this paper MPEP is extended by adding the preemptive slot allocation method for improving the performance of slot allocation and hence emergency handling in WBAN, which is termed as Hybrid MPEP (HMPEP). To verify numerical results, we implemented set up and simulated using NS-2.