Wireless body sensor networks in medical settings operate under the conflicting requirements of maintaining the desired reliability and message latency of data transmissions, while simultaneously maximizing battery-life of individual body sensors. In doing so, the characteristics of the entire system, including physical, medium access control (MAC), and application layers have to be considered. The aim of this paper is to study a novel quality-of-service fuzzy-rule based cross-layer scheduling algorithm under certain selected medical scenarios for body sensor networks. To fulfill the aforementioned requirements, packet transmissions are scheduled taking into account the channel quality among body sensors and each sensor specific medical constraints. That is to say that sensors waiting time in the accessing system and their residual battery lifetime are also worth bearing in mind. For the fuzzy-logic scheduler implementation, we make use of a newly adapted distributed queuing MAC protocol that has recently been proved to be far more energy-efficient than the IEEE 802.15.4 standard for wireless sensor networks.

Peer Reviewed