WBAN data scheduling and aggregation under WBAN/WLAN healthcare network

Abstract

Nowadays, wireless body area networks (WBANs) become an emerging technology which has grown considerably. An increase in the deployment of devices on patients promotes researchers and application developers to focus on issues related to WBAN networks. Therefore, several studies have been done in this field by researchers. The IEEE 802.15.6 standard was proposed to satisfy all the requirements for WBANs communication. As sensed data in such type of networks, it should be transmitted in a reliable and QoS based way. A public-BAN is defined as a network of several personal-BANs. The centralized public-BAN consists of a static coordinator and several personal-BANs. The static coordinator is able to command a portable coordinator in order to control a personal-BAN and runs as an Internet Gateway. In this paper, we considered bridging communications between the IEEE 802.15.6-based WBANs and the IEEE 802.11e-based centralized public-BAN (WLAN). Especially, we proposed two new scheduling algorithms to satisfy QoS requirements in WBAN networks and to overcome the starvation mode of the packets without the highest priority. In order to perform this aim, we introduced the critical delay (CD) as a parameter to serve packets taking into account their priorities and classify them into an aggregated frame. The performance of our proposed schedulers is compared with Priority Queue scheduler (PQ) and Priority Queue Aggregation scheduler (PQA). Conducted simulations illustrate that our proposed schedulers performance overcomes the other schedulers in term of latency, throughput and dropped packets for emergency, general monitoring and controlled load traffics.