EADA: Energy-Aware Adaptive Duty-Cycle Adjustment in Superframe for IEEE 802.15.6-Based Wireless Body Area Networks

The IEEE 802.15.6 standard is a prominent communication protocol for wireless body area networks (WBANs), enabling seamless and reliable data transmission between wearable sensor devices. Energy efficiency is a critical concern in WBANs due to the limited battery capacity of these devices. To address this challenge, this letter proposes an energy-aware duty cycle adjustment mechanism within the superframe of IEEE 802.15.6 medium access control (MAC) protocol to conserve more energy by the sensor devices and the coordinator without compromising other important quality of service metrics such as reliability and throughput. We dynamically adjust the length of the active and IA phases of the superframes based on the current traffic load and the previous superframe's slot utilizations. Moreover, we designed a priority-based scheduled slot allocation algorithm for sensor devices in managed access phase. We achieved better network lifetime compared to IEEE 802.15.6 MAC and other benchmarks. In comparison, the proposed approach achieves 40% improvement in network lifetime over IEEE 802.15.6 MAC.