Energy Efficient Priority-Based Hybrid MAC Protocol for IoT-Enabled WBAN Systems

Among the wireless body area network (WBAN) scarce resources, energy resource is an essential resource on which most of the WBAN biomedical devices activities depend upon. The biomedical devices are usually battery-powered and if they fail to operate as required because of battery power drain, the WBAN system would become unreliable, and this could lead to life-threatening situations. Consequently, it would be advantage and logical to minimize energy consumption and energy wastage issues to achieve an energy-efficient WBAN system. Following this, we proposed a coordinated superframe duty cycle hybrid MAC (SDC-HYMAC) protocol to enhance energy efficiency and to prolong the biomedical devices’ lifetime. To improve the energy efficiency of the WBAN system, we introduced different energy resource management strategies including the design of a priority-based slot-allocation scheme to minimize timeslot and energy wastage. Also, we proposed a coordinated superframe duty cycle (SDC) scheme to accurately select an appropriate superframe order (SO) based on the traffic information and the priority level of the biomedical devices to save energy and prolong the devices’ lifetime. We compared the SDC-HYMAC protocol with other related protocols like MG-HYMAC, HyMAC, and CPMAC for the sake of validation, and is simulated in MATLAB. The outcome of the simulation results revealed that the SDC-HYMAC protocol performed better than the existing protocols using performance metrics like convergence speed, energy efficiency, delay, packet drop ratio, and devices’ lifetime.