MDP-Based MAC Protocol for WBANs in Edge-Enabled eHealth Systems

Abstract

In recent years, eHealth systems based on the Internet of Things (IoT) have attracted considerable attention. The wireless body area network (WBAN) is an essential technology of eHealth systems. A major challenge in WBAN is the design of the medium access control (MAC) protocol, which plays a significant role in avoiding collisions, enhancing the energy efficiency, maximizing the network life, and improving the quality of service (QoS) as well as the quality of experience (QoE). In this study, we apply the mobile edge computing (MEC) network architecture to an eHealth system and design a multi-channel MAC protocol for WBAN based on the Markov decision process (MDP). In this protocol, the channel condition and the reward value are considered. By continuously interacting with the environment, the optimal channel resource allocation strategy is generated. Simulation results indicate that the proposed WBAN MAC protocol can adaptively assign different channels to the sensor nodes for data transmission, thereby reducing the collision rate, decreasing the energy consumption, improving the channel utilization, and enhancing the system throughput and QoE.