SuperSA: Superframe design based slot allocation of Wireless Body Area Networks for healthcare systems

Pervasive healthcare system plays an important role in emergency treatment and early detection of diseases. Wireless Body Area Network (WBAN) is the base of pervasive healthcare system. One of the major challenges of WBANs is sustainable power supply for the miniature sensor nodes. We propose a superframe based time division multiple access (TDMA) protocol for WBANs in healthcare systems. By taking the data heterogeneity into account, slot allocation scheme is proposed for the sake of sensor energy efficiency. In addition, sleep mode without extra information interaction is presented. Sensor node can turn to sleep (turn off RF but sample as usual) in the whole superframe only by judging local information. Within the system, we formulate an energy consumption optimization problem to determine the parameters. Finally, we introduce some performance metrics of system, and the simulation results show the advantages of our scheme.