Data priority based slot allocation for Wireless Body Area Networks

This paper focuses on the slot allocation scheme of MAC protocol to achieve energy-efficiency for the Wireless Body Area Network (WBAN). The WBAN is adopted to realize the wireless communication between the patient and the monitoring station in a healthcare system. The energy of miniature sensor nodes in WBAN is mainly consumed in the wireless interface and MAC protocol. We propose a time division multiple access (TDMA) protocol which takes advantage of the fixed topology of the WBAN. To implement the sensor energy efficiency, a slot allocation scheme is taken into account. Considering the heterogeneity of nodes, we formulate the problem as a Binary Integer Nonlinear Dynamic Programming (BINDP) to setup data priorities to achieve high slot utilization. Two heuristic algorithms are designed to solve the problem. Our results show that the proposed algorithms have the advantages of less energy consumption, higher slot utilization rate, and lower delay of the system.