Emergency handling in MICS based Body Area Network

Abstract

Body Area Network, a new wireless networking paradigm, promises to revolutionize the healthcare applications. A number of tiny sensor nodes are strategically placed in and around the human body to obtain physiological information. The sensor nodes are connected to a coordinator or a data collector to form a Body Area Network. The tiny devices may sense physiological parameters of emergency in nature (e.g. abnormality in heart bit rate, increase of glucose level above the threshold etc.) that needs immediate attention of a physician. Due to ultra low power requirement of wireless body area network, most of the time, the coordinator and devices are expected to be in the dormant mode, categorically when network is not operational. This leads to an open question, how to handle and meet the QoS requirement of emergency data when network is not operational? Emergency handling becomes more challenging at the MAC layer, if the channel access related information is unknown to the device with emergency message. The aforementioned scenarios are very likely scenarios in a MICS (Medical Implant Communication Service, 402-405 MHz) based healthcare systems. This paper proposes a mechanism for timely and reliable transfer of emergency data in a MICS based Body Area Network. We validate our protocol design with simulation in a C++ framework. Our simulation results show that more than 99 percentage of the time emergency messages are reached at the coordinator with a delay of 400ms.