A new back-off mechanism for the S-MAC protocol with applications in healthcare

In this paper, a modified S-MAC protocol incorporating a new back-off mechanism applicable to body sensor networks (BSNs) is proposed. The proposed protocol alleviates the drawback associated with the back-off mechanism which is currently utilized in the original S-MAC protocol in addition to its derivatives. Also, the cross-layer technique is used so as to achieve a better energy consumption and a reduced delay which are both accomplished by adjusting the contention window adaptively. Performance analysis of the modified S-MAC protocol is evaluated in a network simulator (i.e., NS-2) by monitoring the energy efficiency, delay and throughput parameters in an example BSNs. The obtained results show a significant improvement with the proposed protocol performance compared to the original counterpart.