Hybrid Priority MAC Mechanism For WBAN

Abstract

Last few years, wireless body area network (WBAN) has been widely researched for various healthcare applications (e.g., realtime healthcare, non-medical service, patient's urgent state monitoring system, etc.). Because of the restriction by device hardware conditions (e.g., energy and memory), we need to design a high-efficient MAC layer protocol to improve the transmission efficiency of WBAN. In addition, when the emergency situation happens to a patient, a priority mechanism is necessitated for a urgent message to get through to the final destination. This paper presents a priority mechanism referred to as hybrid priority MAC for WBAN. By simulation, we show the proposed MAC protocol can minimize the average packet latency.