Improving Reliability of Emergency Data Frame Transmission in IEEE 802.15.6 Wireless Body Area Networks

Wireless body area networks (WBANs) are formed by tiny and intelligent sensor devices that are implanted within the tissue or attached on the surface of the human body to acquire both periodic as well as emergency physiological data. WBANs should be capable of reporting physiological emergency events to the doctors and care-givers reliably and as quickly as possible. In this paper, we propose and analyze an efficient channel access scheme for nodes carrying emergency data frames so as to improve the reliability of emergency data frame transmission. We also present an analytical model to compute the average delay and reliability experienced by emergency data frames, under the proposed scheme. Extensive analytical and simulation results are presented to establish that the proposed emergency handling scheme leads to significant improvement in reliability over the default scheme specified by IEEE 802.15.6.