Energy Efficient Real Time Reliable MAC Protocol for Wireless Body Area Network

Abstract

Wireless Body Area Network (WBAN) has attracted the researchers during the last decade due to its wide range of applications. However, QoS requirement, prolong network lifetime and supporting different types of traffics produced by various sensors are the prominent barriers for deploying the network. A number of Medium Access Control (MAC) protocols have been developed to meet the above requirements. However, stringent Qos requirement, energy efficiency and delivery of emergency data have become the prime objectives of the researchers. In this paper, we propose an energy efficient real-time reliable media access control (ER-MAC) protocol for QoS-aware data transmission over WBAN with prolonged network life time. This protocol is based on IEEE 802.15.4 model which is very popular in healthcare application due to its low power and low cost features. Our proposed ER-MAC protocol modifies the super frame of IEEE 802.15.4 model with an intention to reducing the loss rate and delay of the emergency data without degrading the QoS of non emergent data. The proposed protocol is compared with existing protocol through the simulation carried out in Castalia 3.2. The simulation results reveal that ER-MAC outperforms the existing counterparts.