Intelligent slots allocation for dynamic differentiation in IEEE 802.15.6 CSMA/CA

eHealth applications have become essential in everyday life healthcare especially for elderly and sick individuals. To provide efficiency to such applications, many standards emerged for WBANs. However, WBANs standards showed their limits in terms of QoS and priorities differentiation depending on applications need. In this paper, we investigate IEEE 802.15.6 MAC performance efficiency and we define TA-802.15.6, an enhanced IEEE 802.15.6 CSMA/CA channel access mechanism. We aim to differentiate all IEEE 802.15.6 priorities traffics and to improve IEEE 802.15.6 based networks performances. Our main contribution is the enhancement of IEEE 802.15.6 CSMA/CA retransmission and packet drop processes. We also defined a new algorithm for dynamic backoff bounds assignment according to IEEE 802.15.6 priorities and to the network traffic state. We make an analytical evaluation through a new 4D Markov chain and by simulation based on Castalia. Results validate that the enhanced IEEE 802.15.6 CSMA/CA version provides a better service differentiation through accentuating priority differentiation and a better QoS in terms of reliability, throughput and energy consumption. (C) 2018 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.