Reliable Transport Protocol Based on Loss-Recovery and Fairness for Wireless Body Area Networks

The transport protocols for Wireless Body Area Networks (WBANs) must provide end-to-end reliability and Quality of Service (QoS) for the whole network. This task can be accomplished through the reduction of the PLR (Packet Loss Ratio) and the latency while keeping fairness and low energy consumption between the nodes. The IEEE 802.15.6 Standard supports QoS, but it does not suggest any transport protocol for WBANs. This paper proposes a transport protocol for WBANs based on an energy-efficient and emergency-aware MAC (Medium Access Control) protocol and the IEEE 802.15.6 Standard. This new transport protocol is a cross-layer design that uses loss-recovery and fairness to provide reliability to the network. The protocol detects out-of-sequence packets and requests retransmission of the lost packets. It outperforms the MAC protocol and the IEEE 802.15.6 Standard in the percentage of the packet loss with and without emergency traffic, while keeping a similar energy consumption.