A dynamic allocation scheme of scheduled slots for real-time heterogenous traffic in IEEE 802.15.6 standard for scheduled access mechanism

With the advent of recent trends in micro miniature sensor technologies, the wireless body area networks (WBANs) have become prevalent in health monitoring applications. The IEEE 802.15.6 standard has been designed to cater to the vital requirements of the wireless healthcare services, such as WBANs. However, this standard suffers from the static allocation of slots for the scheduled access mechanism. Fixed allocation of scheduled slots for the nodes may affect the overall performance of the network used in healthcare applications. In order to address this problem, we propose a scheme called varySchedSlots which dynamically schedules slots to the nodes contending for the channel access based on their data rates. The need for dynamic scheduling is investigated in this work by considering some vital health abnormalities such as heart, neurological and respiratory disorders as the data sources. Through extensive simulations, the performance of the proposed varySchedSlots protocol is evaluated and it is observed it outperforms the existing IEEE 802.15.6 static allocation of scheduled slots in terms of various performance metrics such as packets received per node, application-level latency, packet loss rate, packets reception rate, and consumed energy.