An optimal fuzzy control medium access in wireless body area networks

Wireless body area network (WBAN) collects significant signals of human body or environment information for health monitoring or professional services. But normal medium access protocols can hardly make a balance and ensure enough reliability of a network because there are specific features and service quality in WBAN applications. Contention access or fixed allocation of bandwidth cannot meet all nodes' requirements and may cause collisions and delay. Especially in emergency medical situations, some data must be transmitted immediately for accurate diagnosis and decision. The dropping of critical messages could possibly create life threatening results. In order to improve the reliability and efficiency of data transmission in WBAN, this paper proposes a fuzzy control medium access (FCMA) mechanism based on input parameters for performance gains. It controls the contention window in contention access period (CAP) and slots allocation in contention free period (CFP) according to nodes' status. Through simulation analysis, the improved performance of throughput, latency, and packets breakdown is demonstrated by efficient usage of bandwidth and avoidance of collision. (C) 2014 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.