REO: A Reliable and Energy Efficient Optimization Algorithm for Beacon-Enabled 802.15.4–Based Wireless Body Area Networks

Nowadays, due to the advancements in microelectronics and wireless communications, Wireless Body Area Networks (WBANs) have gained significant attention. They have various application fields including telemedicine, military, sports, and entertainment, which require contradictory Quality of Service (QoS) in terms of reliability, delay, energy, and simplicity. Medium Access Control (MAC) protocols play an essential role in finding a solution to these tradeoffs. Many ongoing research activities, primarily based on the low power IEEE 802.15.4 standard, tried to improve the WBAN performance by MAC parameter adjustment but, to the authors' knowledge, none were able to properly satisfy delay and reliability requirements. In this paper, a numerical MAC optimization algorithm is proposed for the Beacon-enabled IEEE 802.15.4-based WBANs, optimizing the delay, reliability, and energy tradeoffs based on the existing traffic and QoS requirements. The simulation results show that in comparison with similar works, the energy efficiency and reliability are improved by at least 14% and 25%, respectively while reducing the delay substantially.