Efficiency and robustness management for IEEE 802.15.4 in healthcare sensor network

To meet the requirements on data collection from wireless sensor network for healthcare application especially in hospital, the performance of wireless communication is an important issue. In particular, simultaneous transmissions from numerous sensors will cause serious collision which leads to transmission packets loss and delay. In this paper, a management scheme, multi-criteria decision making method using TOPSIS, for IEEE 802.15.4 is proposed for wireless sensor network. The performance of the network is determined by beacon order, superframe order, contention window, number of backoffs and backoff exponent. By analyzing slotted CSMA-CA mechanism, which is in the beacon-enabled mode, through OPNET, the proposed scheme can estimate the best combination of the parameters. The results show that the proposed scheme achieves the best combination of low end-to-end delay, high throughput and high successful probability.