A Multi-Criteria Prioritization Based Slot Allocation Scheme in IEEE 802.15.4 for Wireless Body Area Networks

Wireless Body Area Network (WBAN) is a network of wearable and/or implantable sensor nodes that transmits body vitals to the sink for remote health monitoring of patients. Data and sensor node prioritization in WBAN is a challenging problem as loss of important data may prove to be fatal. In this paper, a multi-criteria environment is considered to allocate Guaranteed Time Slots (GTSs) to the sensors in IEEE 802.15.4 MAC protocol standard. We have focused on allocating GTSs to the sensors based on their need. For that the sensors are prioritized that is hardly considered by the existing works. Fuzzy Analytical Hierarchy Process is applied here to prioritize the sensors for allocating them the GTSs based on the following criteria—Remaining energy, Event Occurrence, Buffer Index, Data Slot, Link Quality and Recently Used Index. The results indicate that each sensor eventually gets a chance to transmit thus preventing data loss and starvation.