A Reliable Data Transmission Mechanism in Coexisting IEEE 802.15.4-Beacon Enabled Wireless Body Area Networks.

Advances in wireless sensor and internet technologies has rapidly increased the prevalence of remote health monitoring using wireless body area networks (WBAN). However, it turns out that WBAN pervasiveness draws attention to address the data transmission challenges. Due to the limited bandwidth in the industrial, scientific, and medical (ISM) band , WBAN performance degrades in parallel with the increasing number of active devices sharing the same network infrastructure. As a result, during carrier sense the increasing device density impedes the synchronization mechanism that raises packet collision probabilities in the transmission channel. In this view, access to the transmission channel for health care applications in coexisting WBANs is limited, and the transmission of aperiodic data becomes unreliable. Therefore, in this article, we propose performance improvement for coexisting WBANs through transmission prioritization and adaptive channel access mechanisms. We categorize user data into classes and implement transmission prioritization scheme that considers data category, device synchronization, dynamic clear channel assessment (DCCA), backoff range adaptation, and packet retransmission trials in stationary and mobile networks. The simulation results show the performance of the proposed model’s carrier sense multiple access with collision avoidance (CSMA-CA) for collocated WBANs in terms of throughput, delay, and packet delivery ratio outperform the conventional IEEE 802.15.4 and the transmission scheme applied in Traffic Class Prioritization Medium Access Control (TCP-MAC) protocols.