Energy Efficiency Optimization for Wireless Body Area Networks Under 802.15.6 Standard

With the attractive applications in e-Health, a booming interest is granted to wireless body area network (WBAN). Through WBAN, healthcare professionals can continuously monitor patient vital signs and detect critical conditions which results in major improvements in the quality of patients' lives and also in the quality of healthcare services. The big challenge for WBAN is to track and maintain good quality of service (QoS) under real-time and dynamic conditions. In this paper, we propose an enhanced medium access control (MAC) protocol under IEEE 802.15.6 standard based on traffic prioritization. Simulations results show that the proposed protocol outperforms IEEE 802.15.6 MAC in terms of QoS and energy saving under traffic-fluctuation conditions.