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An Emergency Slot Handling Method for In-hospital Wireless Body Sensor Networks
C. P. Sangeetha and V. Bhanumathi

A wireless body sensor network is a group of wireless physical sensors placed on or within the human body for various medical and non-medical applications. The medium access control protocols play a major role in heterogeneous and critical sensor networks. Most of the existing medium access protocols are not well defined to meet the features of wireless body sensor applications. One of the challenging issues in medical applications is the emergency data handling capability. Also, the network should be reliable in terms of high packet data delivery and shorter network delay for timely diagnosis of chronic diseases. In this paper, a fog-based in-hospital patient monitoring sensor network framework is introduced. Each patient is equipped with a fog computing device that can assign priority to a network based on the analysis of the sensed data. If any abnormality is noted in the measured data, it initiates the emergency transmission. Also, a new scheme for emergency data transmission has been proposed called the emergency slot handling technique. This methodology handles the emergency data of a patient in a fast and accurate manner through the cloud server so that the physician can take the necessary steps for treatment. The simulation of the proposed method is performed for both static and mobile scenarios by varying time and packet-generation rate. The result highlights that it outperforms the conventional IEEE 802.15.4 MAC and Fast Channel Assignment Scheme in terms of the average end-to-end delay and throughput for both static and mobile conditions.

Keywords: Wireless body sensor network, emergency services, IEEE 802.15.4, fog computing, emergency slot

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