QoS-Aware Heuristic Scheduling with Delay-Constraint for WBSNs

Wireless body sensor networks (WBSNs), which efficiently and intelligently sense the physiological signals of the medical patients to support various medial applications, have allured tremendous attention from various research communities. For energy and resource constrained WBSNs, the important issues include: 1)~dynamic channel characteristics due to mobility and postural dynamics; 2) high energy efficiency owing to limited battery power; 3) high quality-of- service (QoS) requirement due to critical physiological data. To address the above issues, a cost-effective heuristic packet scheduling scheme is designed to provide the high network throughput and fair QoS to WBSNs. Unlike most of the existing works, we also consider the optimal delay- constraint in order to achieve the optimized packet transmission delay and to manage the heavy traffic load optimally. Specifically, we consider the critical factors of WBSNs to prioritize the data packets among access points, e.g., medical emergent patients have the higher priority to send their data packets than the normal patients. We formulate the proposed scheme mathematically. Simulation results are presented to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed heuristic packet scheduling scheme over other existing state-of- the-art solutions, in terms of packet transmission delay, cost and network throughput.