Implementation of Efficient Mac Protocols for wireless Senosrs in WBA Networks

Abstract

Various medical applications consisting of heterogeneous requirements are supported by WBA networks. For reliable data transmission it is required to use an efficient medium access control protocol. Here, in this project, a dynamic Super frame structure-based MAC protocol is proposed by extending the standard principles from IEEE 802.15.6 which is a standard protocol, a mechanism for allocating dedicated slots with prioritization is used which is known to be Criteria Importance Through Inter-criteria Correlation, inorderto assign the allocation of slots for every sensor device. Values of sensor devices are calculated based on different sensors parameters by using CRITIC method. There by we compare our proposed work with the standard IEEE 802.15.6 MAC and other MAC protocols. By simulating it is shown that our proposed MAC protocol has performed better in Reliability, Throughput, Energy Efficiency and also Packet Delivery Delay. In the results it is shown that Reliability of data transmission has increased over more than 50% over the standard IEEE 802.15.6 MAC.

Introduction

I. INTRODUCTION

The future of healthcare is MOBILE healthcare via Wireless body area networks (WBAN).WBAN is often made up of a variety of independent on-body physiology monitoring sensor devices that are all wirelessly linked to a central coordinator (or hub). By continuously or sporadically monitoring physiological processes including blood pressure, breathing, heart rate, ECG, body temperatureetc.,[1],[2],[3], [4]. WBANs data collection during routine health monitoring helps to speed up and improve the accuracy of the diagnosis. Recently, we have also seen a sharp rise in the use of WBANs in numerous heterogeneous applications for a variety of industries, including sports, the military, gaming, and even in conjunction with various cutting-edge enabling technologies, like software-defined networks (SDNs), big data and the Internet of Things(IoT)[5],[6],[7],[8],[9].

In a WBAN, physiological monitoring sensors vary depending on variety of factors, including user priority (UP), packet generation rate, data transmission rate,packet size, buffer capacity, etc. The total effectiveness of a WBAN is significantly influenced by all of these sensor settings.The differences between the sensor devices are not taken into account in the existing studies based on the IEEE 802.15.6 standard. In this study, all these issues were taken into account when deciding which sensor equipment to use. The main objective of the proposed project is to increase the efficiency and reliability of WBAN as a whole by allocating certain time slots for specific equipment according to a certain time (fixed boot time).

A. In Brief Description of the MAC Protocol for IEEE 802.15.6

Wireless body area networks (WBANs) have become a crucial component of many fields and are still developing thanks to research in areas like energy efficiency, data quality, and Quality of Service (QoS). Although WBANs are part of the larger family of sensor networks, they play a unique role since they assess people rather than their surroundings.This makes it clear that, similar to how no two people are the same, so too may the utility of WBANs vary widely. A user might need intensive electrocardiogram (ECG) monitoring, whilst another user would need intensive blood pressure monitoring. Furthermore, it's not always possible to predict when a piece of sensor data will become crucial.As an illustration, a patient with lung disease might have sensors that measure the most significant sensor. ECG sensor data, however, may at any moment be crucial in the event of a heart-related emergency, such as a heart attack.

The IEEE Standards Association's 802.15.6 standard for WBANs included three access modes in addition to planned and unscheduled access:

1. Beacon Mode with Beacon Periods: Access modes that contains bounded access periods (beacon periods) that are organized by a beacon transmitted at the beginning of each corresponding beacon period and contain phases for scheduled and unscheduled access.
2. Non-beacon Mode with Beacon Periods: The access time is constrained by beacon periods, with unscheduled access taking up the entire time during each period.
3. Non-beacon Mode without Beacon Periods: Unscheduled access makes use of all time slots and is not constrained by a beacon period.

Our attention was concentrated on the first of these three: beacon mode with beacon periods, which satisfies our desire for flexibility in our MAC protocol by allowing a combination of planned and unscheduled access. In this access mode, the hub polls the sensor nodes and then broadcasts a beacon with the current beacon period's scheduling data. Important and/or emergency data from a sensor(s) may request to use the EAP phase, in which it communicates to the hub alone and avoids interference. In the RAP phase, all additional sensor nodes with less crucial data may then compete to transmit to the hub using CSMA/CA or another collision avoidance technique.

In 2012, the IEEE working group developed IEEE 802.15.6, a standard for modeling communication between sensor devices connected to WBAN. [10]. The hub must function in one of the three access modes described in the standard. The access mode that proves most beneficial is beacon mode with beacon periods since it strives to synchronize communication among different sensor units. In this mode, the hub divides the time axis into super frames (SFs), which are equal-length beacon periods. Beacon frames, which provide data about the network and SF structure, are broadcast by the hub at the start of each SF, with the exception of the inactive SFs. As shown in Fig.1,the medium access control (MAC) SF structure of IEEE 802.15.6 is made up of a variety of access phases, including two Managed Access Phases, one CAPs, two RAPs, and two EAPs. Table I provides a summary of these Access Phases' specifics. Table II lists UP mapping with data traffic type.

According to the standard, all access phases other than RAP1 may have lengths of zero during a beacon phase. Depending on the demands of the application, the hub determines the length of each access phase.

The EAP layer in the IEEE 802.15.6 standard is long and is used only for fast data transmission.

If there is no emergency data present in the network at a given time, the entire EAP phase will be forfeited due to the finite length of EAPs. Additionally, The emergency data cannot be fully transferred by the fixed-sized EAPs when there are many of them, which would deteriorate the emergency data transmission. We introduced the idea of dynamic length EAP to address this issue.

It is not ideal for channel allocation for the emergency data to contend within the EAP phases under the IEEE 802.15.6 standard. In our proposed work, Time Division Multiple Access (TDMA) was employed to assign dedicated slots for emergency data within the EAP.                                                                   

TABLE 2

USER PRIORITY MAPPING [9]

The following are the contributions of the suggested MAC.

1. The MAC solution put forth in the proposal takes into account a hybrid SF structure with dynamic EAP and MAP.
2. The Criteria Importance Through Inter criteria Correlation (CRITIC) approach is used to prioritise sensor devices based on the values assigned to different parameters and the significance of the criteria.
3. Dynamically added special windows in the MAP assign each sensor device a specific slot based on its priority rating.
4. In contrast to the MAC protocol defined by the IEEE 802.15.6 standard and its several Standard versions, the suggested MAC enables reliable data transfer while consuming more throughput and less average energy.

II. RELATED WORKS

Innovative MAC methods are being proposed by researchers all around the world, designed around the original MAC protocol specified by the IEEE 802.15.6 standard framework. These research efforts, of course, has some advantages and disadvantages, which are concisely covered in this part. To prevent contention and ineffective use of SF time, Zia et al. [11] presented a novel group-based traffic classification in the IEEE 802.15.6 standard.

An MAC technique for cross-layered energy-aware resource allocation was put forth by Chen and Chiu [12]. Regarding the protocol of maximum ratio combining, Li et al.'s joint power allocation strategy was put forth [13]. The authors created an optimisation challenge and then found a solution in order to maximise the overall network throughput. Throughput heterogeneity was addressed by Wang et al. [14],who made an effort to reduce energy use in both battery-free and battery-assisted cases. The writers approached these issues using a variety of techniques, including gradient descent, bisection search algorithms, the Lagrange dual sub gradient method, etc. To guarantee low power consumption and minimal latency for emergency data reporting, Liang et al. [15] presented the energy-aware and energy-efficient MAC (EEEA-MAC) protocol. In order to maximise throughput for each sensor, He et al. [16] presented a joint weight optimising time slot allocation methodology (JWTA), in which the weight is determined via an analytical hierarchy approach. A modified SF structure of an IEEE 802.15.4-based MAC protocol was proposed by Rasheed et al. [17] in order to reduce delay and increase energy efficiency.

Through the integration of the power cap with modifying the uncore frequency Hao et al. [18]recommended a method to approximate the Pareto-efficient power cap configurations for achieving precise energy optimization and power cap allocations to the systems with power constraints. To create a more energy-efficient structure, Cicioglu and Alhan[19] created an IEEE 802.15.6-based event driven wireless body sensor networks (WBSNs) technique. Additionally, they created a WBSN architecture for energy gathering. To lessen the damaging effects regarding the interaction of electromagnetic signals, caused by HUB placement which is fixed with the human tissue, the authors took levels of battery, particular sensor device priority and absorption rates, into consideration in one of their other research [20].

In addition to the works stated above, we also review the research below, which are more pertinent to the work that is being proposed. As we compared performance, we also used them as benchmarks. In a system developed by Enkoji et al.[21], In MAPs, the polling technique is utilized to transmit data. A MAC protocol for medical emergency devices (MEB MAC) protocol was designed by Huq et al. [22] to balance channel access delay and power usage. To enable speedy, this protocol dynamically includes MAPs within emergency traffic for channel access, facilitating the insertion of several listening windows (LWs).

In order to transfer emergency traffic reliably and swiftly, TDMA was utilized by the authors within MAPs. The SF structure of MEB MAC does not contain the EAPs. Two IEEE 802.15.6-based MAC protocols, saturation aware for the user priorities (SAUPs) and saturation Aware for the highest UP (SAH),were proposed by Sadra and Abolhasan[23]. The SF structure of SAUP and SAH also includes a phase for allocating guaranteed time slots (GTSs), in addition to other access phases. Instead of using the CSMA/CA technique, SAH assigns assigning dedicated time slots (GTSs) for emergency data within EAP via the TDMA-based approach. To increase the SF utilization of the IEEE 802.15.6 MAC protocol, Saboor et al. [24] presented a dynamic slot allocation (DSA) technique employing nonoverlapping contention windows (CWs). To prevent inter-priority collisions, the authors of this study devised the nonoverlapping back off algorithm (NOBA). In order to reduce waste caused by fixed slot size, they also implemented a DSA scheme. An adaptive SF structure-based channel access technique was put out by Deepak and Babu [25] to increase the reliability of emergency data transfer. For IEEE 802.15.6-based WBAN, Misra et al. [26] presented by MAC which is  energy-efficient scheme. In this, the authors proposed an SF structure with a first half for transmission of emergency data and a second half for routine data transmission.

Synthesis: In addition to introducing the principles of EAP with dynamic length and specifically allocated slots for emergency data within EAP utilizing in addition to TDMA, it is required to have a mechanism of sensor prioritization that determines its sequence to sensor nodes for dedicated slot allocation according to the priority or the required level of their data. Hence applying the CRITC model to determine priority value based on numerous sensor-related characteristics, sensor nodes' urgency is determined. It should be noted that none of these previous works took such techniques into account. Numerous sensor parameters, including packet production rate, data transmission rate, buffer occupancy status and packet size, are important, but they are not considered in the works that have been done so far.

 For instance, sensor devices with a high rate of packet production and a full buffer need quick channel access; otherwise, packet loss from buffer overflow can occur. To prioritize the sensor devices using the CRITIC technique, we therefore take into account all of these pertinent aspects in the proposed work. We also evaluatethe effectiveness of the MAC protocol proposed against a few standards. [20]–[25].

III. SUGGESTED STUDY

The major objective regarding the suggested the aim is to allocate dedicated slots with better network performance based on sensor prioritization. Designing a dynamic SF structure and assigning a high priority to sensor devices are the key obstacles we must overcome in this regard. The following sections are used to describe the suggested solution for the benefit of the readers: The proposed MAC's super frame structure is shown in A, sensor prioritization utilizing CRITIC is shown in B, C, and D, and descriptions of the aspects used for comparison are shown in A, B, and C, respectively.

A. Super frame Design of the suggested MAC scheme

This suggested that the MAC protocol function is designed for a WBAN with a star topology, in which a hub oversees all aspects of network functioning. The period of contention-based contention and the period of contention-free operation are both present in the suggested MAC. The hub will never sleep. We take into account a flexible length MAP, a constant length RAP and a variable length EAP in the suggested MAC. We maintain the RAP's fixed length as per the IEEE 802.15.6 standard.

The SF structure of the suggested MAC protocol is shown in Fig. 2. In EAP, we use TDMA to assign dedicated slots in descending order of priority value to all emergency sensor devices (containing UP 7 data packets). The emergency sensor devices may have quick and dependable channel access with the assignment of dedicated slots in the EAP utilizing TDMA. Within the RAP various kinds of information transmission will use the CSMA/CA technique to send their data. In order to allot spaces for various types of sensor devices, several LWs are dynamically placed into the MAP. The hub assigns slots in both the EAP and the MAP in accordance with the priority level of the sensor devices, established by CRITIC through evaluating the values of different parameters which are been received from the sensor devices.1)Variable MAP and EAP: Depending on the data the hub gathered from all of the sensors during the beacon phase a variable EAP and variable MAP can be created by varying their length. The hub determines the duration of the EAP (AL ) and the timeframe of the MAP (AM ) depending on the quantity of the information packets in emergency sensors (UP 7). The time taken to deliver all of the packets from emergency sensors that the hub captured during the beacon phase (AT ) is used to calculate the variableAL . In math, it has the following representation:

B. Prioritizing Sensors Utilizing CRITIC

Various sensor characteristics are listed as input in both algorithms for allocating dedicated slots. Priority values are determined using the CRITIC approach, and sensors are arranged according to their priority values before slots are assigned. The goal, criteria, and alternatives make up the three main parts of the multi criteria weight measuring technique CRITIC [26]. The importance of sensors is still largely undetermined. Depending on the importance given, standard models represent specific indicators. Finally, and most importantly, electronic devices are included in this model and special opportunities are offered to them.

Below is a formal definition of them.

Definition 1: A sensor node's UP value represents the criticality of the data it has sensed.

The emergency information has a 7-priority value. is the highest UP data. Data traffic type UP mapping is already indicated in Table II.

Conclusion

In this work, we suggested a MAC protocol based on priority is totally devoted for the slot allocation for each sensor tool and a dynamic SF shape. each sensor tool is given a specific wide variety of EAP and MAP slots primarily based on its priority fee. every sensor device\'s priority price is established based on a selection of sensor metrics, inclusive of UP, packet introduction charge, buffer occupancy repute, records transmission rate, and packet length, the use of a mathematical version called CRITIC. in step with the simulation results, various MAC protocols which includes the IEEE 802.15.6 preferred are appreciably outperformed in phrases of network QoS and energy economic system.

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Copyright

Copyright © 2023 Dr. B. Venteshulu, G. Krishna Kishore, T. Kavya. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.