Abstract

In this paper, a throughput- and channel-aware (TCA) medium access control (MAC) scheduling scheme is presented and evaluated for smart body area network (SmartBAN) standard, developed by the European Telecommunication Standard Institute (ETSI). The presented algorithm utilizes the radio link signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) to select the candidate nodes for a given time slot in the first phase, while, in the second phase, the slot is assigned to one of the chosen nodes based on their priority level and data packet availability. The algorithm uses an m-periodic scheduling technique, in which the nodes are considered for slot assignment according to their data packet generation rates during the second phase. Subsequently, a comprehensive explanation of the TCA algorithm execution through the slot reassignment method in SmartBAN is provided. For performance comparison, we use four key performance indicators (KPIs), which include packet reception rate (PRR), latency, energy consumption per successful transmission, and throughput. The simulation results indicate a significant performance gain of the SmartBAN-complaint TCA algorithm in terms of PRR and energy efficiency over the reference SmartBAN MAC scheduling with and without repetition. The average improvement in the PRR results is approximately 40%, whereas a maximum enhancement of 66% is observed in terms of energy efficiency while satisfying the throughput and latency requirements of the use case considered during simulations. Furthermore, we introduce some enhancements in the primary TCA to decrease the frequency of TCA execution via slot re-assignment frames transmission for reducing energy consumption, which results in a slight improvement of energy efficiency.