• The Journal of The Korea Institute of Intelligent Transport Systems
• /
• v.9 no.6
• /
• pp.151-158
• /
• 2010

In line with the requirement of appropriate protocol support for such mission-critical wireless sensor network (WSN) applications as patient monitoring, we investigate the framework for designing medium access control (MAC) schemes. The data traffic in medical systems comes with inherent traffic heterogeneity as well as strict requirement of reliability according to the varied extents of devise-wise criticality in separate cases. This implies that the quality-of-Service (QoS) issues are very distinctly delicate requiring specialized consideration. Besides, there are features in such systems that can be exploited during the design of a MAC scheme. In a monitoring or routine surveillance application, there are degrees of regularity or predictability in traffic as coordinated from a node of central control. The coordinator thus takes on the role of marshaling the resources in a neighborhood of nodes deployed mostly for upstream traffic; in a collision-free scheme, it schedules the time slots for each superframe based on the QoS specifications. In this preliminary study, we identify the key artifacts of such a MAC scheme. We also present basic performance issues like the impact of superframe length on delay incurred, energy efficiency achieved in the network operation as obtained in a typical simulation setup based on this framework.