A Prioritized Channel Access and Adaptive Backoff Mechanism for WBAN

The IEEE 8202.15.4 standard, known for its low power consumption and short range communication, is ideally suited for use in wireless body area network (WBAN), which is facing energy scarcity problems. However, it is unable to differentiate data priorities during operation and cannot be adaptively adjusted according to the state of the nodes. Therefore, this paper proposes an alternative combination of priority-based channel access and adaptive backoff mechanism. Firstly, the high-priority data can be accessed after the first clear channel assessment (CCA) without going through two CCAs. Secondly, a fuzzy logic algorithm is used to quantify the state of the nodes based on the node residual energy ratio and the buffer residual space ratio, and the initialisation parameters of the backoff mechanism are adjusted according to the real-time state and priority of the nodes. Simulation results show that the proposed strategy has better performance in terms of network lifetime, throughput, packet delivery rate and average end-to-end delay, and can effectively ensure the transmission of high-priority data.