Dynamic Slot Allocation Scheme for Efficient Bandwidth Utilization in Wireless Body Area Network

The fundamental function of Wireless Body Area Network (WBAN) is to convey information over short distances. Because of their tremendous potential in medical and home applications, WBANs have raised tremendous research interests in recent years. Optimal and efficient slot allocation is one of the most active research areas in low-latency applications. The proposed dynamic slot allocation scheme address the bandwidth underutilization problem of the Guaranteed Time Slot (GTS) allocation scheme by IEEE 802.15.4 standard. The scheme is applicable to varieties of applications such as home automation, remote sensing, patient monitoring etc., where data rate are low and require dedicated bandwidth for contention free transmissions. The coordinator allocates GTS of size as requested by the device instead of allocating GTSs in the multiple of superframe slots size as in IEEE 802.5.4 standard and avoids the wastage of bandwidth. The scheme is analysed for performance view point and it has been observed that the proposed scheme is better than IEEE 802.15.4 standard, in terms of bandwidth utilization and number of devices supported.