A Priority-based Data Transmission for Energy Efficiency MAC Protocol with Wireless Body Area Networks

Abstract

Wireless Body Area Networks (WBANs) are a collection of vital and electrical signals measured from various body parts to help analyze therapeutic approaches for patients using wireless data transmission. The significant data has to communicate with collision avoidance to obtain high throughput. In this paper, a hybrid MAC layer communication is implemented between CSMA/CA and TDMA. CSMA/CA communication has been introduced to manage the TDMA sequence of transmissions without a central node. The experimental results in this system implement real wireless devices, TelosB, with the IEEE 802.15.4 standard. We studied the convergence speed of transmission sequence allocation, which was measured in the CSMA/CA period. When the number of nodes is small, the convergence time is slower than a large number of nodes. However, the number of nodes does not affect the number of rounds entering the transmission period. This parameter has been evaluated for the network and energy efficiency in WBANs. Packet delivery ratio, packet numbers, and energy consumption are examined for the different priority-based nodes in the TDMA period. The energy consumption can reduce to 40% for no priority when compared with high priority in the case of a priority-based node.