title: An On-Demand Emergency Packet Transmission Scheme for Wireless Body Area Networks.
abstract: The rapid developments of sensor devices that can actively monitor human activities have given rise to a new field called wireless body area network (BAN). A BAN can manage devices in, on and around the human body. Major requirements of such a network are energy efficiency, long lifetime, low delay, security, etc. Traffic in a BAN can be scheduled (normal) or event-driven (emergency). Traditional media access control (MAC) protocols use duty cycling to improve performance. A sleep-wake up cycle is employed to save energy. However, this mechanism lacks features to handle emergency traffic in a prompt and immediate manner. To deliver an emergency packet, a node has to wait until the receiver is awake. It also suffers from overheads, such as idle listening, overhearing and control packet handshakes. An external radio-triggered wake up mechanism is proposed to handle prompt communication. It can reduce the overheads and improve the performance through an on-demand scheme. In this work, we present a simple-to-implement on-demand packet transmission scheme by taking into considerations the requirements of a BAN. The major concern is handling the event-based emergency traffic. The performance analysis of the proposed scheme is presented. The results showed significant improvements in the overall performance of a BAN compared to state-of-the-art protocols in terms of energy consumption, delay and lifetime.
authors.affiliation: Department of Computer Science and Engineering, College of Electronics &amp; Information, Kyung Hee University, Yongin-si, Gyeongggi-do 17104, Korea. ameen@khu.ac.kr.
authors.forename: Moshaddique
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Al Ameen
authors.affiliation: Department of Computer Science and Engineering, College of Electronics &amp; Information, Kyung Hee University, Yongin-si, Gyeongggi-do 17104, Korea. cshong@khu.ac.kr.
authors.forename: Choong Seon
authors.initials: CS
authors.lastname: Hong
mesh_terms: D003195:Computer Communication Networks; D006802:Human Activities; D006801:Humans; D017216:Telemedicine / Q000379:methods*; D059015:Wireless Technology
keywords: body area network (BAN); emergency; healthcare; media access control (MAC); wake up radio