Action-based scheduling technique for 802.15.4/ZigBee wireless body area networks

Energy-efficient communication protocols in resource-constrained networks and specifically wireless body area networks (WBANs) has been of significant importance since they emerged nearly last decade. In this work, we use the periodic nature of body actions to propose an action-based scheduling technique in which time-slot allocations are adapted to the periodic connectedness of on-body links. In other words, the periodicity of on-body links is employed to predict the future behaviours of links to help develop energy-efficient communications between on-body nodes, thereby elongating the network lifetime. Analysis and measurement with 2.4GHz IEEE 802.15.4/ZigBee compliant micaZ motes in a fitness environment serve as our tool to do action recognition and subsequently scheduling. The proposed technique helps us reach within less than 7% of power consumption lower bound while it does not have complexity of most channel prediction algorithms that can result in excessive process power consumption.