Contention reduction by using group based handling of traffic priorities in WBAN

Abstract

IEEE 802.15.6 WBAN protocol is widely used in the medical field, it consists of sensors that allows medical professionals to monitor their patients remotely and keep track of their activities and vital signs. The IEEE 802.15.6 standard was introduced by the IEEE 802.15.6 Task Group recently which aims to offer reliable, long lasting and efficient patient monitoring solutions. It is a very cost-efficient way of preventing patients from a fatal incident such as heart diseases, hyper sugar, brain damage and lung diseases etc. However, the congestion (which is caused when contention window is continuously accessed by different nodes) and delay in the network can result in data loss which may lead to a tragic incident. Hence researchers have been working to propose a solution which reduces the delay while increasing network throughout and bandwidth efficiency. In this paper, we compare the performance of the standard IEEE 802.15.6 WBAN (CSMA/CA) protocol with our Group priority-based method in terms of throughput, delay and bandwidth efficiency. Two methods are introduced, first is assigning Contention Window size to every node and then the second method is transmitting according to the transmission power of the node. Further the traffic from nodes is categorized into three priority levels i.e. high, medium and low. The traffic is being forwarded according to the priority level of the node and if the high priority traffic is not present then the priority level is further moved in the hierarchy to medium or low accordingly. To verify the credibility of the proposed method, multiple testing scenarios are considered. The results are tested with different number of nodes (5,6,12) and then different payload size is introduced (100B, 200B, 250B). Then all the results are compared with the standard IEEE 802.15.6 WBAN. The simulation is done using OMNET++ with MiXim framework which is a widely used and latest framework for implemented the WBAN protocol. The simulation results and all the variations in the performance testing has clearly indicated that proposed GBA (Group Based Approach) is better than typical IEEE 802.15.6 CSMA/CA