Quality of service aware MAC protocol for cognitive radio based wireless body area network

Abstract

Wireless Body Area Network (WBAN) is envisioned to provide a wide range of health-care services to patients in medical environment such as hospitals and clinics. This increases the deployment of wireless platforms in medical environment that bring new challenges, such as interference with neighboring medical devices and the degradation of Quality of Service (QoS) performance, which may be critical to patient’s safety. Cognitive Radio (CR) is next-generation wireless communications, and artificial intelligence has been widely adopted to provide self-learning in order to observe, learn and take action against its operating environment. The application of CR in medical wireless environment can cater to the aforementioned challenges. To address various application-specific requirements in CR-WBANs, several MAC protocols have been developed for WBANs and CRNs separately but very few Mac protocols have been proposed for CR-WBAN in the literature. Here, we propose a QoS aware medium access protocol (MAC) for CR based WBAN, with dynamic super-frame structure and effective channel availability prediction model.