Priority-Based Dedicated Slot Allocation With Dynamic Superframe Structure in IEEE 802.15.6-Based Wireless Body Area Networks

Wireless body area networks (WBANs) support various types of medical applications with heterogeneous requirements. Therefore, we need to use an efficient medium access control (MAC) protocol to ensure reliable data transmission. In this article, we propose a dynamic superframe structure-based MAC protocol extending the principles of the IEEE 802.15.6 standard. In this work, to allocate dedicated slots for each sensor device, a prioritized dedicated slot allocation mechanism using the criteria importance through intercriteria correlation (CRITIC) is proposed. With the help of this method, the priority value of sensor devices is calculated based on different sensors’ parameters. We compared the performance of our proposed work with standard IEEE 802.15.6 MAC and a few other MAC protocols. The simulation result shows that our proposed MAC protocol performed better in terms of energy efficiency and reliability, as well as reducing the packet drop probability. Results show that the reliability of data transmission increases over the IEEE 802.15.6 MAC protocol by more than 50%.