Real-time dynamic traffic scheduling for medical applications on IEEE 802.15.6

The evolution and actual capabilities of sensor-based technologies concerning miniaturization, processing power and energy efficiency, together with advances in wireless communications, enabled the development and wide dissemination of the so-called wireless body area networks (WBANs) for health applications. The IEEE 802.15.6 standard, although purposely designed for these applications, prompts some issues regarding the schedulability of dynamic traffic as its scheduling services rely on allocation slots assigned statically and that are hard to modify at run time. This paper proposes a novel scheduling approach for this standard, in which the allocation slots are dynamically scheduled in each beacon period, according to the nodes’ requirements, including response to erroneous transmissions of critical traffic, while allowing co-existence with legacy nodes.