Performance Evaluation of Saturated Medical Body Area Network using Priority Reassignment

IEEE 802.15.6 standard defines the Physical and Medium Access Control layers for Medical Body Area Networks (MBAN), where many sensor nodes can communicate with a central hub using a wireless medium. The standard specifies the user priorities and contention window range for the sensor nodes to enable them to achieve the best throughput and high reliability. However, there are eight distinct priority levels (UP0-UP7) which may be assigned to a maximum of sixty-four nodes, resulting in multiple nodes being assigned the same user priority. In such cases local priority needs to be assigned to the nodes within the UP and data throughput must be optimized. In this work, we have used Criteria Importance Through the Intercriteria Correlation (CRITIC) where nodes are put in a priority queue by assigning them local user priority within one of the eight priority levels UP0 to UP7, as defined in IEEE 802.15.6. The method optimizes the backoff count value to minimize the delay for data packets from these nodes in the queue. We have done simulations where results show that the backoff values and the local priorities calculated using CRITIC based upon sensor parameters – packet size, packet generation rate, and data transmission rate improve the throughput of sensors in UP0-UP6.