Design and implementation of a new quality of service-aware cross-layer medium access protocol for wireless body area networks

Abstract

Wireless body area networks (WBANs) consist of tiny sensors that enable monitoring the health status of a person. quality of service (QoS) is a major challenge for WBANs due to the importance of vital sign information. Therefore, many QoS-based medium access control (MAC) protocols and technologies have been developed to overcome this problem. Standardization of various technologies and protocols must be addressed. ISO/IEEE 11073 personal health data standards aim to provide interoperability between healthcare devices and technologies. This paper presents a new QoS-aware cross-layer MAC protocol based on the ISO/IEEE 11073 standards that employs a slot allocation scheme, multi-channel architecture, priority mechanism, admission control, and cross-layer solution. The proposed MAC protocol has been modeled and simulated by OPNET Modeler. In addition, the proposed MAC protocol is compared with standard technologies and recent protocols in the literature, and it achieves better results for end-to-end delay, packet loss ratio, and throughput parameters. (C) 2016 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.