Markov-Decision Process-Based Energy-Aware MAC Protocol for IoT WBAN Systems

The Internet of Things (IoT) enabled wireless body area network (WBAN) systems play a crucial role in healthcare monitoring, enhancing patients’ well-being at an affordable cost. However, their primary challenge lies in energy constraints. To optimize the limited energy resources and extend the lifetime of devices within the network, a hybrid multichannel (MC) medium access control (MAC) protocol with Markov decision process (MDP-HYMAC) is proposed. This protocol improves energy efficiency, throughput, and network lifetime, and minimizes delays by using separate channels for communication between biomedical devices and access points (APs). In addition, an MDP is employed to stochastically model the systems’ transition states and explore optimal communication strategies between biomedical devices and APs. Furthermore, an adaptive power allocation scheme, a time-slot allocation scheme, and a back-off strategy are designed to minimize time-slot wastage, energy consumption, and delays. The proposed protocol outperforms the baseline methods by achieving significant improvements in energy efficiency from 4% to 22%. The findings of this article strongly indicate that the proposed protocol has the potential to significantly improve the performance of WBAN systems, particularly in the context of sustainable healthcare monitoring.