A QoS-Based Medium Access Control Protocol for WBANs and Its Performance Evaluation

Abstract

Nowadays, Wireless Body Area Networks (WBANs) are used in many fields. WBANs are described as small sensor nodes that communicate wirelessly and provide services to the personal area. Quality of Service (QoS) is an essential issue for WBANs due to the importance of human life. QoS problems can only be solved with a robust Medium Access Control (MAC) protocol in WBANs. To find a solution to this problem, developers performed many MAC protocols for WBANs. ISO/IEEE 11073 health informatics defines the standard of personal health information and purposes to provide interoperability between medical technologies. This paper presents a MAC protocol that provides ISO/IEEE 11073 communication standards with QoS support, bases on cross-layer architecture. We designed a slot assignment scheme, prioritization mechanism, admission control mechanism to provide QoS. The performance evaluation of the proposed MAC protocol is compared with IEEE 802.15.4 and IEEE 802.15.6 protocols by considering end-to-end delay, packet loss ratio, and throughput parameters, and it has achieved out performance. It is observed that the proposed protocol doesn't exceed 45 ms delay, reached 81% traffic load, and a maximum error rate of 0.162%.