Emergency data collected from sensor nodes widely distributed in wireless body sensor networks (WBSNs) are delivered to medical staff as quickly as possible, so patients’ lives can be saved through appropriate actions and treatments. However, relevant data and vital data may be required for appropriate actions by the medical staff. Therefore, all these data must be properly delivered to the medical staff within the set time. In this paper, we propose a MAC protocol with a reservation function and an operation frame extension function to extend the overall network lifetime by reducing the energy consumption of given sensor nodes and quickly deliver information to medical systems in case of emergency. This MAC protocol makes it possible to achieve fast transmission of related data by utilizing the related-priority slots. As a result of the experiment, the transmission delay was reduced by about 12.5%, and the lifetime was increased by approximately 19% over the existing MAC protocol. It also can be seen that the proposed MAC protocol works well in an environment where emergency events often occur.
An Energy-Efficient MAC Protocol for Medical Emergency Monitoring Body Sensor Networks
