Abstract
In medical body area network (MBAN) sensors are attached to a patient’s body for continuous and real-time monitoring of biomedical vital signs. Sensors send patient’s data to hospital base station so that doctors/caregivers can access it and be timely informed if patient’s condition goes critical. These tiny sensors have low data rates, small transmission ranges, limited battery power and processing capabilities. Ensuring reliability in MBAN is important due to the critical nature of patient’s data because any wrong/missing/delayed data can create a situation in which doctors may take wrong decisions about patient’s health which can have fatal results. Data transmission reliability in MBAN can be ensured by retransmissions, acknowledgments or guaranteed time slot mechanism but it causes more power consumption. We propose an efficient MAC mechanism to achieve both reliability and energy efficiency at an acceptable trade-off level. The proposed MAC mechanism not only overcomes the limitations of ZigBee MAC mechanism such as inefficient CSMA/CA and underutilization of guaranteed time slots, but also adapts for different traffic types such as emergency and normal traffic. Our results show that application level throughput and packet delivery ratio increase and packet loss decreases. We also optimize energy utilization by tuning macMaxCSMABackoffs and macMinBE parameters of ZigBee MAC mechanism.
Highlights
Wireless sensor network is composed of tiny sensors for the purpose of sensing or monitoring different environmental or physiological parameters and conditions[1]
We focus on improving reliability and energy efficiency in medical body area network and propose an enhancement in ZigBee MAC mechanism to achieve these performance outcomes
These results show the total number of packets created as an application layer, total packets transmitted at the MAC layer, number of packets sent
Summary
Wireless sensor network is composed of tiny sensors for the purpose of sensing or monitoring different environmental or physiological parameters and conditions[1]. In a medical body area network, medical sensors attached to a patient’s body to monitor the patient’s vital signs and forward data to sink node for further processing and taking actions. There are a number benefits of medical body area network such as continuous and real time patient monitoring, early detection of patient’s critical health conditions, timely treatment, and solving the issues of medical staff shortage, etc. Medical body area network is a very beneficial application of wireless sensor network, but there is still a space for improvement in this field because improving reliability and energy efficiency is really a big challenge[20].
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Free) 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a call
