An IEEE 802.15.6-Based MAC Frame Aggregation Approach for Wireless Body Area Networks

Wireless Body Area Networks (WBANs)support low delay and low energy consumption data transmissions for real-time health monitoring. There is a variety of traffic types with different frame lengths in WBANs. However, transmitting short frames brings more overhead such as control frames, which decreases network throughput and transmission efficiency, also increases energy consumption. In this paper, we propose a Medium Access Control (MAC)Frame Aggregation Approach (FAA)based on IEEE 802.15.6 to guarantee Quality of Service (QoS)provision. The proposed FAA MAC protocol classifies different traffic data with similar QoS requirements into one data queue. Then, the FAA aggregates several small MAC Protocol Data Units (MPDU)into one Physical Layer Service Data Unit (PSDU)in each queue in the light of the maximum tolerance delay of different services and the current survival time of different types of traffic data. We also design an aggregation algorithm to perform the aggregation procedure. The simulation results conducted on the Castalia show that our proposed FAA highly improves the network throughput and decreases the average packet delay compared with IEEE 802.15.6.