A New Emergency Handling Mechanism based on IEEE 802.15.4 for Health Monitoring Applications

Abstract

The recent advances in wireless communication systems and semiconductor technologies are paving the way for new applications over wireless sensor networks. Health-monitoring application (HMA) is one such emerging technology that is focused on sensing and reporting human vital signs through the communication network comprising sensor devices in the vicinity of the human body. The sensed vital signs can be divided into two categories based on the importance and the frequency of occurrence: occasional emergency signs and regular normal signs. The occasional emergency signs are critical, so they have to be delivered by the specified deadlines, whereas the regular normal signs are non-critical and are only required to be delivered with best effort. Handling the occasional emergency sign is one of the most important attributes in HMA because a human life may depend on correct handling of the situation. That is why the underlying network protocol suite for HMA should ensure that the emergency signs will be reported in a timely manner. However, HMA based on IEEE 802.15.4 might not be able to do so owing to the lack of an appropriate emergency-handling mechanism. Hence, in this paper, we propose a new emergency-handling mechanism to reduce the emergency reporting delay in IEEE 802.15.4 through the modified superframe structure. A fraction of an inactive period is modified into three new periods called the emergency reporting period, emergency beacon period, and emergency transmission period, which are used opportunistically only for immediate emergency reporting and reliable data transmission. Extensive simulation is performed to evaluate the performance of the proposed scheme. The results reveal that the proposed scheme achieves improved latency and higher emergency packets delivery ratio compared with the conventional IEEE 802.15.4 MAC.