Priority consideration in inter-WBAN data scheduling and aggregation for monitoring systems

Wireless body area networks (WBANs) are composed of small intelligent tiny wireless sensors; these sensors are responsible for collecting information of a patient's vital signs and transmitting vital information. WBAN offers mobility to patients and flexibility to medical staff. An increase of the deployment of monitoring systems on patients promotes researchers and developers to focus on issues related to WBAN. Quality of service (QoS) has been always treated as a major issue in WBAN technology, and scheduling as a packet prioritizing mechanism contributes to QoS guarantee provisioning significantly. In this paper, two novel inter-WBAN data scheduling and aggregation are developed for monitoring systems in order to satisfy QoS requirements in WBAN networks. We introduced a novel parameter called critical delay to serve packets taking into account their priorities and classify them into an aggregated frame to be further transmitted to medical server. The proposed scheme provides QoS-guaranteed service for the applications running on the sensor nodes in all the three aspects of QoS, that is, delay, throughput and packet loss. Copyright (C) 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.