Traffic priority based delay aware scheduling for co-located WBANs

Abstract

Wireless Body Area Network (WBAN) is a promising solution that has gained significant attraction in the human health monitoring system. Body sensors measure the physiological parameters of the human body and send the data to the access point via coordinator or local processing unit (e.g., smartphones, PDA) for further analysis. Data transmission from the local processing unit to the access point, known as inter-WBAN transmission, is challenging since many problems such as interference, poor link quality, and scarcity of resources can arise. As a result, data may be lost, or transmission may be delayed, which turn can endanger the user’s health. The situation could be worse when the user suffers from critical diseases and has to coordinate with other WBANs co-located in the same vicinity. This paper focuses on dynamic slot scheduling and topology handling of WBAN, whose neighborhood is constantly changing due to its mobility. To guarantee the performance of different WBAN’s criticality; we propose Critically Aware Threshold Sensitive (CATS) scheduling algorithm for coexisting WBANs data transmission. CATS treats all the nodes in the same WBAN as a whole and allocates the same slot to nodes of the WBAN so that the data transmission delay of a critical WBAN can be minimized. The proposed method categories and schedules the WBANs based on the sensor data priority and WBAN’s criticality index. Furthermore, we have considered for categorizing the WBANs into various groups. In this work, the network performance is evaluated using these threshold values. Simulations are conducted to evaluate the performance of the proposed CATS against the existing scheduling algorithms with respect to various performance metrics. Simulation results show that the proposed method has lower transmission delay and higher spatial reuse factor.