Alarms management in wireless body area networks

Using wireless body sensors in medical field is becoming an efficient, low cost and non invasive way for continuously monitoring patients´ vital signs. New MAC protocols have to be designed to handle the intrinsic constraints of Wireless Body Area Networks (WBANs) especially insuring low latency for alarms management and high reliability. In this paper, we propose a new access method in WBANs for alarms management: E-Health Access Channel Mechanism (E-HACM). E-HACM is intended to be used in e-health applications designed to monitor patients´ vital signs by fixing on them body sensors for periodic measurements and to detect critical cases that require real-time delivery and no data loss. Simulation results show that our proposed mechanism outperforms IEEE 802.15.4 in terms of delay, energy consumption and packet loss ratio.