Low-Delay Channel Access Technique for Critical Data Transmission in Wireless Body Area Network

Abstract

The healthcare, e-health, and other entertainment services have attracted researcher’s interest in Wireless Body Area Network (WBAN). IEEE 802.15.6 MAC protocol is recently developed to overcome the challenges and issues present in the existing IEEE 802.15.4 MAC Protocol. The decisive role of WBAN is to transmit the critical or emergency data packet with minimum delay over the transmission medium. The delay minimization problem was concentrated by several researchers under IEEE 802.15.4 and IEEE 802.15.6 MAC protocols. However, there are no complete solutions to resolve the channel access problem of the critical data packet. This paper introduces an effective Low-Delay Channel Access Technique (LDCAT) to minimize the transmission delay of the critical data packet. For that purpose, an additional field termed as Severity Indicator (SI) is appended in the MAC header in order to indicate the severity condition of the data packets before the coordinator node starts to allocate the time slots during the data transmission phase. Subsequently, the header information is analyzed, after that the slots are allocated to the nodes based on the importance of data traffic. Finally, the simulation results are evaluated to the proposed technique in terms of energy consumption, average delay and throughput using OMNet++ network simulator tool to show that the achieved results outperforms better with existing MAC protocols.