With the advancement in networking, information and communication technologies, wireless body area networks (WBANs) are becoming more popular in the field of medical and non-medical applications. Real-time patient monitoring applications generate periodic data in a short time period. In the case of life-critical applications, the data may be bursty. Hence the system needs a reliable energy efficient communication technique which has a limited delay. In such cases the fixed time slot assignment in medium access control standards results in low system performance. This paper deals with a dynamic time slot allocation scheme in a fog-assisted network for a real-time remote patient monitoring system. Fog computing is an extended version of the cloud computing paradigm, which is suitable for reliable, delay-sensitive life-critical applications. In addition, to enhance the performance of the network, an energy-efficient minimum cost parent selection algorithm has been proposed for routing data packets. The dynamic time slot allocation uses fuzzy logic with input variables as energy ratio, buffer ratio, and packet arrival rate. Dynamic slot allocation eliminates the time slot wastage, excess delay in the network and attributes a high level of reliability to the network with maximum channel utilization. The efficacy of the proposed scheme is proved in terms of packet delivery ratio, average end to end delay, and average energy consumption when compared with the conventional IEEE 802.15.4 standard and the tele-medicine protocol.
Fuzzy-Based Dynamic Time Slot Allocation for Wireless Body Area Networks