Selection of Priority in Wireless Body Area Network Sensors using IoT Technology

Abstract

Wireless Body Area Network(WBAN) is an ongoing technology for continuously monitoring the health conditions of a patient. It is a wireless network consisting of various lowpowered physiological sensors and a hub placed strategically on a human body. Each sensor sends physiological data in the form of frames using a medium access control (MAC) protocol to the hub. In turn, the hub relays the physiological data to the physician/doctor’s monitoring device through an access point over the Internet. According to the IEEE 802.15.6 standard, the priority of the frame is based on the sensor monitoring a specific health parameter. In this paper, we propose an Internet of Things(IoT) based mechanism for selecting and changing the priority of the sensors of the WBAN as when required. In other words, a physician/doctor can change the priority of a sensor as when they need to change the priority of the sensor from a distant location. Increasing the priority of a node improves its packet transfer rate, end-too-end delay and the bandwidth bandwidth. Our simulation study shows that the average roundtrip delays incurred for changing the priority of a sensor which is in a network with 3 hops, 5 hops and 7 hops away from the border router are 192ms, 447ms and 545ms respectively. Further, our study shows that the difference in average delay between case 1 (represents an average delay incurred for changing the priority from highest to lowest) and case 2 (from lowest to highest) is 22% of the average delay of case 1. Also, we show that the difference in the power consumed by the lowest and highest priority node is around 20.3%.