D2MAC: Dynamic delayed Medium Access Control (MAC) protocol with fuzzy technique for Wireless Body Area Networks

Wireless Body Area Networks (WBAN) have emerged as an extension to conventional wireless sensor networks in recent years to comply with the needs in providing timely and effective response in healthcare as one of the many target applications such networks have. The traffic of a WBAN is diverse due to different monitoring tasks carried on by sensor nodes. It brings difficulty in how to efficiently organize the access to the medium for the dynamic and various generated traffic. This paper analyses the traffic diversity problem in WBAN for healthcare applications and proposes a dynamic delayed Medium Access Control (MAC) algorithm. A fuzzy logic system is used to incorporate both application and protocol related parameters of the real time traffic to make the backoff time produced in IEEE 802.15.4 MAC protocol traffic adaptive. The simulation results demonstrate a significant reliability in packet transmissions and decrease in the latency with no change in energy consumption level.