Superframe Structure Research Articles

Improving performance metrics in WBANs with a dynamic next beacon interval and superframe duration scheme

The advancement of networking, information, and communication technologies has fueled the popularity of Wireless Body Area Networks (WBANs) in both medical (remote patient monitoring) and non-medical sectors. Due to low, medium, and high data traffic requirements, WBAN performance suffers during the synchronization process that generates periodic beacon frames between sensor nodes and the coordinator. It also suffers when sensor nodes implicitly send data to the coordinator during the fixed time slot using the Contention Access Period (CAP). In this study, we propose a solution called Dynamic Next Beacon Interval and Superframe Duration Scheme (DNBISD) to tackle these issues of the IEEE 802.15.4 standard. This standard relies on a Beacon Interval (BI) and CAP for synchronization and data transmission between sensor nodes and the coordinator. However, the standard must adapt to BI and CAP's changing traffic load requirements, resulting in drawbacks such as prolonged packet delays, increased energy consumption, and potential data loss, particularly in real-time patient monitoring applications. In order to overcome these challenges, our DNBISD scheme employs a fuzzy approach to adapt the BI and CAP based on requested synchronization and data considering input parameters like packet received ratio and buffer ratio. The inference system utilizes the Takagi, Sugeno, and Kang (TSK) fuzzy model for rational quantitative analysis. Simulations demonstrate that our proposed scheme significantly enhances data transmission, boosts the average packet delivery ratio and throughput, and reduces the coordinator's average packet loss ratio and energy consumption. Consequently, this improvement allows for more efficient data transfer among numerous nodes within the specified superframe structure.

A novel energy-efficient adaptive superframe structure for OWC-based real-time bio-sensor networks

A novel energy-efficient adaptive superframe structure for OWC-based real-time bio-sensor networks

A novel scheme to improve lifetime and real-time support for IEEE 802.15.4 based wireless personal area networks

IEEE 802.15.4 defines the working of physical and media access layers of a Low-Rate Wireless Personal Area Network (LR-WPAN). A LR-WPAN is a low cost, low power, and low data-rate network that offers reasonable lifetime and reliable data transfer within a limited range. However, it faces several challenges whilst dealing with applications that are having strict timeliness, energy, and bandwidth requirements. This paper proposes an efficient superframe structure for the MAC layer of IEEE 802.15.4 networks that intends to deal with these challenges by varying the functionalities of Guaranteed Time Slot (GTS) bits. Simulations of different GTS allocation techniques show that our enhanced scheme outperforms the original standard as well as previous techniques in terms of energy consumption, average delay, maximum GTS allocation and reliability.

An Adaptive Energy Efficient MAC Protocol for RF Energy Harvesting WBANs

Continuous and remote health monitoring medical applications with heterogeneous requirements can be realized through wireless body area networks (WBANs). Energy harvesting is adopted to enable low-power health applications and long-term monitoring without battery replacement, which have drawn significant interest recently. Because energy harvesting WBANs are obviously different from battery-powered ones, network protocols should be designed accordingly to improve network performance. In this article, an efficient cross-layer media access control protocol is proposed for radio frequency powered energy harvesting WBANs. We redesigned the superframe structure, which can be rescheduled by the coordinator dynamically. A time switching (TS) strategy is used when sensors harvest energy from radio frequency signals broadcast by the coordinator, and a transmission power adjustment scheme is proposed for sensors based on the energy harvesting efficiency and the network environment. Energy efficiency can be effectively improved that more packets can be uploaded using limited energy. The length of the energy harvesting period is determined by the coordinator to balance the channel resources and energy requirements of sensors and further improve the network performance. Numerical simulation results show that our protocol can provide superior system performance for long-term periodic health monitoring applications.

A Review on Dynamic Buffer Traffic Condition Protocol in Telemedicine

Various MAC-protocol has been adopted over the years in Telemedicine, also known as Wireless Body Area Network system (WBANs), to enhance the proper transmission of the busy congestion of data message. However, these techniques could not coordinate traffic congestion in the receiver node, which could make the receiver nodes experience an "active mode" most of the time compared to the transmit node. This is dangerous to the network system because of uncontrollable energy usage. In this protocol, the intelligent sensor is strategically located around or implanted in the human body for the collection of human body physiological parameters. WBANs experienced some limitations such as latency and excessive consumption of energy which may hinder the lifetime maximization of the system if not taken care of properly. In this work, four elements are responsible for carrying-out only traffic data, and they are implemented by using the highest priority sensor nodes within a short period used for communicating to the Buffer Traffic Condition (BTC) discussed and the traffic measurement to mitigate active-mode interval in the receiving phase of the improved superframe structure of IEEE 802.15.6. Furthermore, meaningful information about the superframe to mitigate the busy traffic and enhance this protocol was also discussed as its possible functions with the help of an adaptive system. No article depicts the analysis of the work on the dynamic buffer traffic condition scheme, and this proposed scheme can improve on the existing one.

A Modified IEEE 802.15.6 Mac Scheme to Enhance Performance of Wireless Body Area Networks in E-Health Applications

The recently released IEEE 802.15.6 standard specifies several physical (PHY) layers and medium access control (MAC) layer protocols for variety of medical and non-medical applications of Wireless Body Area Networks (WBAN). The medical applications of WBAN has several obligatory requirements and constrains viz. high reliability, strict delay deadlines and low power consumption. The standard IEEE 802.15.6 MAC scheme is not able to fulfil the all requirements of medical applications of WBAN. To address this issue we propose an IEEE 802.15.6-based MAC scheme that is the modification of superframe structure, user priorities and access mechanism of standard IEEE 802.15.6 MAC scheme. The proposed superframe has three access phases: random access phases (RAP), manage access phases (MAP) and contention access phase (CAP). The proposed four user priorities nodes access the channel during RAP using CAMA/CA mechanism with a large value of contention window. The proposed MAC scheme uses RTS/CTS access mechanism instead of basic access mechanism to mitigate the effect of hidden and expose terminal problem. Moreover, we develop an analytical model to evaluate the performance of proposed MAC scheme and solve the analytical model using Maple. The results show that the modified IEEE 802.15.6 MAC scheme achieve the better performance in terms of reliability, throughput, average access delay, energy consumption, channel utilization and fairness compared to standard IEEE 802.15.6 MAC scheme in E-health applications.

PkCOs: Synchronization of Packet-Coupled Oscillators in Blast Wave Monitoring Networks

Blast waves with a large amount of energy, from the use of explosive weapons, is a major cause of traumatic brain injury in armed and security forces. The monitoring of blast waves is required for defence and civil applications. The utilization of wireless sensing technology to monitor blast waves has shown great advantages, such as easy deployment and flexibility. However, due to drifting embedded clock frequency, the establishment of a common timescale among distributed blast monitoring sensors has been a challenge, which may lead to a network failing to estimate the precise acoustic source location. This work adopts a packet-coupled oscillators (PkCOs) protocol to synchronize drifting clocks in a wireless blast wave monitoring network. In order to address packet collisions caused by the concurrent transmission, an anti-phase synchronization solution is utilized to maintain clock synchronization, and the corresponding superframe structure is developed to allow the hybrid transmission of the <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Sync</i> packet and the blast wave monitoring data. As a network scales up and the hop distance grows, the packet exchange lag increases during a superframe. This, along with the drifting clock frequency, leads to the degradation of synchronization performance while the clock frequency is usually assumed to be zero and nondrifting. Thus, a compensation strategy is proposed to eliminate the joint impacts and to improve synchronization precision. The theoretical performance analysis of the PkCOs algorithm in the network is presented along with verification by simulation means. Finally, the performance of the PkCOs synchronization protocol is evaluated on an IEEE 802.15.4 hardware testbed. The experimental results show that the PkCOs algorithm provides an alternative clock synchronization solution for blast wave monitoring networks.

TRW-MAC: A thermal-aware receiver-driven wake-up radio enabled duty cycle MAC protocol for multi-hop implantable wireless body area networks in Internet of Things

Implantable Wireless Body Area Network (IWBAN), a network of implantable medical sensors, is one of the emerging network paradigms due to the rapid proliferation of wireless technologies and growing demand of sophisticated healthcare. The wireless sensors in IWBAN is capable of communicating with each other through radio frequency (RF) link. However, recurring wireless communication inside the human body induces heat causing severe thermal damage to the human tissue which, if not controlled, may appear as a threat to human life. Moreover, higher propagation loss inside the human body as well as low-power requirement of the sensor nodes necessitate multi-hop communication for IWBAN. A IWBAN also requires meeting certain Quality of Service demands in terms of energy, delay, reliability etc. These pressing concerns engender the design of TRW-MAC: A thermal-aware receiver-driven wake-up radio enabled duty cycle MAC protocol for multi-hop IWBANs in Internet of Things. TRW-MAC introduces a thermal-aware duty cycle adjustment mechanism to reduce temperature inside the body and adopts wake-up radio (WuR) scheme for attaining higher energy efficiency. The protocol devises a wake-up estimation scheme to facilitate staggered wake-up schedule for multi-hop transmission. A superframe structure is introduced that utilizes both contention-based and contention free medium access operations. The performance of TRW-MAC is evaluated through simulations that exhibit its superior performance in attaining lower thermal-rise as well as satisfying other QoS metrics in terms of energy-efficiency, delay and reliability.

Priority-Based Dedicated Slot Allocation With Dynamic Superframe Structure in IEEE 802.15.6-Based Wireless Body Area Networks

Wireless body area networks (WBANs) support various types of medical applications with heterogeneous requirements. Therefore, we need to use an efficient medium access control (MAC) protocol to ensure reliable data transmission. In this article, we propose a dynamic superframe structure-based MAC protocol extending the principles of the IEEE 802.15.6 standard. In this work, to allocate dedicated slots for each sensor device, a prioritized dedicated slot allocation mechanism using the criteria importance through intercriteria correlation (CRITIC) is proposed. With the help of this method, the priority value of sensor devices is calculated based on different sensors’ parameters. We compared the performance of our proposed work with standard IEEE 802.15.6 MAC and a few other MAC protocols. The simulation result shows that our proposed MAC protocol performed better in terms of energy efficiency and reliability, as well as reducing the packet drop probability. Results show that the reliability of data transmission increases over the IEEE 802.15.6 MAC protocol by more than 50%.

A Study on the Wireless Body Area Network MAC Protocol Using Dynamic Superframe for e-Health IoT

One of the most remarkable applications of the Internet of Things is health monitoring. Wireless body area networks (WBANs) consist of several body sensors implanted in or place on a human body and a coordinator. One of the essential issues of WBANs is the design of Medium Access Control (MAC) protocol to improve system efficiency. In this paper, we modify the IEEE 802.15.4 standard MAC superframe structure and propose an energy-efficient MAC protocol for WBANs in the e-Health Internet of Things (IoT) systems. In this scheme, the time slots are divided into mini-slots. The lengths of the contention access period and the contention free period are both variable. By using this mechanism, the utility of time slots can be considerably increased.

Design of an Adaptive Scheduling Algorithm for a Warp Knitting Machine Industrial Wireless Network Based on Fuzzy Control

Aiming at resolving the technical bottlenecks existing in current warp knitting machine control systems, such as the distributed industrial wireless networked control system, in this study the architecture of a warp knitting machine industrial wireless networked control system based on the WIA-PA international standard is proposed which provides a design idea for building a „smart factory”. Secondly, according to the WIA-PA specification, an allocation plan of time slots in a super-frame for intra-cluster and inter-cluster communication is given. Third, in order to enhance the real-time access of equipment, expand the network capacity, and reduce the energy consumption of the system, based on the carrier sense multiple access (CSMA) mechanism supported by IEEE STD 802.1 5.4:2006, an adjustment algorithm of the super-frame structure based on fuzzy control was designed. The effectiveness of the design method was verified by simulation.

An Energy Efficient Adaptive Wake-Up Radio MAC (EEAWuR-MAC) Protocol for IoT Wireless Body Area Networks

In this paper an improved adaptive energy efficient MAC (EEAWuR-MAC) protocol is proposed to handle emergency data transmission in internet of things wireless body area networks (WBANs) by incorporating the wake-up radio (WuR) mechanism. In WuR based WBANs a body node starts data transmission in an on-demand manner by sending a WuR-message (WuM). The WuR based MAC (WuR-MAC) protocols reduces the latency of data transmission and saves more energy in contrast to duty-cycling MAC protocols. Therefore, the superiority of WuR mechanism over duty-cycling shifts the trend towards WuR-MAC protocols. Furthermore, the investigation of emergency data (ED) handling mechanisms is still required at MAC layer. It is observed that inappropriately configuring the 802.15.4 MAC parameters may lead to performance deterioration in terms of energy efficiency and quality of service (QoS) such as throughput and delay. Therefore, a substantial modification in the existing IEEE 802.15.4 super-frame structure is essentially required for efficiently handling the ED transmission. The proposed protocol employs a modified superframe structure of IEEE 802.15.4 MAC, mainly designed for ultra-low power medical applications under normal and emergency traffic conditions concurrently without any interruption. A systematic analytical framework is developed to derive the mathematical expressions based on M/G/1/2 queuing model to evaluate the performance of proposed protocol in terms of throughput, delay and energy consumption and its validation is carried out using MATLAB simulation.

An enhanced superframe structure of IEEE 802.15.4 standard for adaptive data requirement

In this paper, the superframe structure of IEEE 802.15.4 standard is improved to meet the adaptive data traffic requirements of hierarchical Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs). In the IEEE 802.15.4 standard, sensor nodes send their data implicitly by using the Guaranteed Time Slots (GTS) to their PAN coordinator. The standard does not meet the adaptive data requirements of GTS requesting nodes. If requesting GTSs in an active period are more or less than the available limit, then either the requested nodes will not be entertained or GTSs remain underutilized. Consequently, it may cause unnecessary delays or poor GTS utilization. In this work, an Enhanced Superframe offering Adaptive Duty cycle (ESAD) is proposed. ESAD adapts the active period in accordance with the requested data. In addition, the actual size of GTS has been halved to accommodate more GTS requesting nodes. The shortest job first algorithm is applied to scrutinize the requested GTS nodes. Simulation results verify that the proposed scheme increases the link utilization, improves the data transmission, reduces the delay, and allows more nodes to transfer their data in a specified superframe.

PrEEMAC: Priority based energy efficient MAC protocol for Wireless Body Sensor Networks

Wearable wireless sensors, or Wireless Body Sensor Network (WBSN), is one of the most recent fields of research in healthcare applications. The sensors are placed on the human body to detect the critical medical parameters and transmit the collected data to a centralized node. Though the devices work at low energy and power constraints, maintenance of such devices is a crucial aspect. In light of this requirement, an efficient medium access control (MAC) protocol should be utilized to extend the life time of the network. In this paper, we propose a new “Priority based Energy Efficient (PrEE) MAC protocol” incorporated with various priorities in predefined devices based on data sensing and normal devices changing to priority when the value is more than the threshold, by modifying IEEE 802.15.4 header bits. The PrEE MAC protocol is designed based on the IEEE 802.15.4 and its Superframe structure. The simulation results show that the energy efficiency and lifetime of the proposed MAC protocol is more as compared to the existing MAC protocol.

5G Wireless Networking Connection and Playback Technology Assist the Low‐Latency Propagation of New Media

This article conducts an indepth study on the delay caused by time division multiple access (TDMA) technology and theoretically analyzes some methods that can reduce the TDMA delay. Traditional dynamic time slot allocation algorithms usually only consider the completion of conflict‐free time slot allocation in distributed scenarios, but they do not clearly specify the order of time slot allocation. The order of time slots allocated to each node is ultimately consistent with the new data flow. The order of media dissemination is not the same. Aiming at the scheduling delay problem caused by the inconsistency of the new media low‐latency propagation time slot allocation sequence and the data stream sequence, a protocol using the master time slot adaptive time slot exchange technology is proposed. The protocol designs the corresponding super frame structure and realizes the neighbor node discovery strategy and the time slot allocation based on the priority list. At the same time, the time slot switching technology is used to adjust the time slot sequence so that it tends to the data flow sequence. The exchange criterion based on the low‐latency propagation data stream value of the new media is designed to solve the problem of optimizing the time slot of multiple data streams in the network. Through the simulation results and analysis, it can be seen that the architecture design proposed in this paper can fulfill the expected requirements of the wireless Mesh network and can achieve good low‐latency performance for the highly dynamic network topology. It can also achieve good performance in terms of network throughput and data flow delivery rate, and it has adaptability to high dynamic topologies. By comparing with the traditional algorithm design, the design proposed in this paper has a large improvement in low latency and high submission rate. Therefore, it can be considered that the low‐latency architecture design proposed in this article has better performance for new media’s low‐latency propagation and highly dynamic network topology.

A Novel MAC Protocol for Energy Conservation in Wireless Body Area Networks

Body sensor networks are an example of wireless sensor networks. Body Sensor Network is a kind of wireless sensor network for a special purpose that uses wireless sensor nodes to measure a person's biological parameters and monitor his or her health remotely and is available in both wearable and implantable types. These systems also monitor physical activity such as environmental parameters. These systems can provide significant assistance by supplying services such as medical observations and the provision of medicinal and medical information, improving the memory of individuals and controlling home devices and communicating in emergencies. Body wireless sensor network is a wireless technology featuring small, smart devices that connect to the body and monitor it continuously, enhancing early detection of emergency situations in patients at high health risk and providing a wide range of health services, therefore of paramount importance. The most important challenges in wireless sensor networks are sensor nodes, resource constraints, reliability and quality of service, security and routing, and energy consumption constraints. In this article, we focused on energy consumption due to small sensors with limit power resource and latency for emergency data to improve network lifetime, energy consumption, network efficiency and lower latency. This research will provide a way to optimize energy consumption by examining the energy exhaustion and network performance in the MAC layer. It assumed that by improving the access to MAC in wireless body area network can have better operation power and by propound the energy parameter in data transition priority. Optimizing energy consumption and minimizing delays and increasing the latency are the goals of this study by modify the IEEE 802.15.4 superframe structure based on MAC layer protocol.

Analysis of the Influence of Differential Consolidation Settlement of Foundation on Redistribution of Internal Forces in Superstructure of Buildings

In order to explore the influence of differential settlement of foundation on the internal force and deformation of super-frame structure, the stress and deformation of the traditional fixed support model and the elastic support model under the local effect of the differential settlement of the two columns are compared. The model without considering the settlement of the structure (Model 1), the traditional fixed support model (Model 2), and the vertical elastic support model (Model 3) are respectively constructed for analysis. The left end of the frame column and A/1-2 beam are taken as an example, the axial force of the frame column in Model 3 significantly decreases from -817.8kN to -415.3kN compared with Model 1, with a reduction of 49%; the shear force at the left end of the lower A/1-2 beam increases from 42.3kN to 43.5kN with an increase of 3%; and the bending moment increases from -27.2kN⋅m to 152.7kN⋅m. Those indicate the shear force and bending moment of the beam directly connected with the subsidence column under the action of the elastic support model are smaller than that under the action of the fixed support model. It is hoped that these change rules can provide reference for the design and reinforcement of similar projects in the future.

A novel superframe structure and optimal time slot allocation algorithm for IEEE 802.15.4–based Internet of things

IEEE 802.15.4 standard is specifically designed for a low-rate and low-processing Internet of things (IoT) applications and offers guaranteed time slots. A beacon-enabled IEEE 802.15.4 consists of a superframe structure that comprises of the contention access period and contention-free period. During contention-free period, nodes transfer their data using guaranteed time slots without any collision. The coordinator node receives data transmission requests in one cycle and allocates guaranteed time slots to the nodes in the next cycle. This allocation process may cause large delay that may not be acceptable for few applications. In this work, a novel superframe structure is proposed that significantly reduces guaranteed time slots allocation delay for the nodes with data requests. The proposed superframe structure comprises of two contention access periods and one contention-free period, where contention-free period precedes both contention access periods with reduced slot size. In addition, the knapsack algorithm is modified for better guaranteed time slots allocation by allowing more guaranteed time slots requesting nodes to send their data as compared to the IEEE 802.15.4 standard. The simulation and analytical results show that the proposed superframe structure reduces the network delay by up to 80%, increases contention-free period utilization up to 50%, and allocates guaranteed time slots up to 16 nodes in a single superframe duration.

Hybrid MAC Protocol for Brain–Computer Interface Applications

Brain-computer interface (BCI) can permit individuals to use their thoughts as the sole means to control objects such as smart homes and robots. While BCI is a promising interdisciplinary tool, researchers are confronting network lifetime as an obstacle to further development. Furthermore, the medium access control (MAC) protocol is the bottleneck of the network reliability. There are many standards for MAC protocols that can be utilized for productive and dependable transmission by altering the control parameters. Modifying these parameters is another source of concern due to the scarcity in knowledge about its effect. In addition, there is no instrument accessible to receive and actualize these parameters on transmitters embedded inside the cerebrum. In this article, we give the transmission instrument to both ultrahigh-frequency (UHF) radio frequency identification (RFID) and ultra-wideband (UWB) signals for multiple transmitters and ultrasonic technology mimicking the neural dusts by modifying the superframe structure. In this article, a hybrid MAC protocol is proposed, and the results show that the traffic received can be increased by 700% for UHF-RFID and more than 100% for UWB and ultrasonic technology. Comparative results for wireless channel MAC protocols using these different transmission techniques are discussed in terms of network delay, data dropped, traffic sent, and traffic received.

I-MAC: In-Body Sensor MAC in Wireless Body Area Networks for Healthcare IoT

The application of Internet-of-Things (IoT) technology in modern healthcare environment has given rise to a new paradigm known as healthcare IoT. The wireless body area network (WBAN) is one of the basic building blocks of IoT-based healthcare system, comprising many wearable (on-body) and implant (in-body) sensors placed in or around patient body connected to a hub for physiological signal monitoring. In in-body sensor-based WBAN, guaranteeing quality-of-service and prolonging network lifetime are major impediments due to the sensor location and limited battery capacity. In this article, we propose a novel energy-efficient medium access control (MAC) protocol for IEEE 802.15.6 standard complaint in-body sensor-based WBAN. Typically, the in-body sensor-based WBAN communication is hub-initiated; however, in case of an emergency event, the in-body sensor node transmits an emergency frame arbitrarily without sensing the channel. This inadvertent in-body sensor-initiated transmission has a very high probability of collision with the ongoing hub-initiated transmission, and/or another in-body sensor-initiated emergency frame transmission. This results in emergency frame retransmission and consequently affects the node's energy consumption and lifetime. To alleviate this issue, we propose a modified superframe structure, in which separate access phases are introduced for the emergency event and regular event. In case of an emergency event, a novel emergency event handling scheme and a ranking and priority assignment protocol is proposed to detect and address the critical event of in-body sensors. To minimize the collision, a scheduled access mechanism is proposed according to the criticality of the node. Performance analysis of the proposed in-body sensor MAC is done in terms of latency and overall power consumption, in case of both emergency and regular events.