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Dynamic backoff scheduling of low data rate applications in wireless body area networks

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Abstract

Reliability stands as the first important factor when dealing with medical data within the context of a wireless body area network (WBAN). The sensor nodes on body send their data to the coordinator based on a beacon-enabled access mode defined in IEEE 802.15.4 medium access control (MAC) specifications. This paper studies an effective backoff resolution into the carrier sense multiple access with collision avoidance (CSMA/CA) procedure of the beacon-enabled access mode of IEEE 802.15.4. Whilst the standard introduces the backoff as a resolution to less probability of identical backoffs, it does not address the efficiency of the generated backoff time in non-identical backoff situations. This phenomenon degrades the reliability of the received data at the coordinator device. A dynamic and reliable MAC algorithm for WBAN is presented in which length of the backoff period for each node gets decided based on its past successful trials in accessing the channel and also its data rate. This encourages a fair access to the medium among all the sensor nodes as moderate backoff values are assigned to each node. The primary contributions in this paper are less delay endured and higher data reliability while making no changes to the level of energy efficiency.

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Notes

  1. In this application one node takes the role of a PAN coordinator in a beacon-enabled 802.15.4 PAN, it transmits periodic beacons and waits for incoming DATA frames. A second node acts as a device, it first scans the pre-defined channel for beacons from the coordinator and once it finds a beacon it tries to synchronize to and track all future beacons. It then starts to transmit DATA frames to the coordinator as fast as possible (direct transmission in the contention access period, CAP).

  2. The FatFs implementation is a direct port of the ChaN FatFs project (http://elm-chan.org/fsw/ff/00index_e.html) to TinyOS.

    During testing of the initial port, Victor Cionca at University of Limerick discovered a great deal of overhead in the file system's cluster window operations, and devised an improved method to handle these without compromising the integrity of the fs.

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Hereby the authors of this paper declare and ensure no conflict of competing interests.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Computing and Mathematics, Charles Sturt University, Locked Bag 588, Wagga Wagga, NSW, Australia

    Nesae Mouzehkesh, Tanveer Zia, Saman Shafigh & Lihong Zheng

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  1. Nesae Mouzehkesh
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  2. Tanveer Zia
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  3. Saman Shafigh
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  4. Lihong Zheng
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Correspondence to Nesae Mouzehkesh.

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Mouzehkesh, N., Zia, T., Shafigh, S. et al. Dynamic backoff scheduling of low data rate applications in wireless body area networks. Wireless Netw 21, 2571–2592 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11276-015-0929-9

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