2011 Volume E94.B Issue 9 Pages 2484-2487
Wireless body area networks (WBANs) provide medical and/or consumer electronics (CE) services within the vicinity of a human body. In a WBAN environment, immediate and reliable data transmissions during an emergency situation should be supported for medical services. In this letter, we propose a flexible emergency handling scheme for WBAN MAC protocols. The proposed scheme can be applied to superframe-structured MAC protocols such as IEEE 802.15.4 and its extended versions. In addition, our scheme can be incorporated into the current working draft for IEEE 802.15.6 standards. Extensive simulations were performed and the low latency of emergent traffics was validated.
