A media access control protocol for healthcare sensor networks

The healthcare sensor network is one of the emerging areas of research for both computer science and health professionals. One of the key challenges in this network is that the traffic in emergency situation requires certain quality of service (QoS) parameters. The medium access control (MAC) layer plays a vital role for reliable and on-time data delivery in the healthcare sensor network. In this paper, we propose a new HealthCare MAC (HC-MAC) protocol for guaranteeing QoS to the emergency traffic without degrading the performance of the network for other traffics. In HC-MAC, the node that has the data request to reserve the time slot. The proposed protocol prioritizes the nodes according to the type of data they want to transmit. This always guarantees the successful and on-time delivery of the emergency traffic. Furthermore, the protocol also uses a multihop technique to increase the throughput and timeliness of other traffics.