Markov decision process based energy aware MAC protocol for IoT WBAN systems

Abstract

Internet of Things (IoT) enabled WBAN systems play a crucial role in healthcare monitoring, enhancing patients’ well-being at an affordable cost. However, their primary challenge lies in energy constraints. To optimize the limited energy resources and extend the lifetime of devices within the network, a multi-channel MAC protocol with Markov decision process (MDP-HYMAC) is proposed. This protocol improves energy efficiency, throughput, and network lifetime, and minimizes delays by using separate channels for communication between biomedical devices and access points (APs). In addition, a Markov decision process is employed to stochastically model the systems’ transition states and explore optimal communication strategies between biomedical devices and APs. Furthermore, an adaptive power allocation scheme, a time-slot allocation scheme, and a back-off strategy are designed to minimize time-slot wastage, energy consumption, and delays. The proposed protocol outperforms the baseline methods by achieving significant improvements in energy efficiency from 4% to 22%. The findings of this research strongly indicate that the proposed protocol has the potential to significantly improve the performance of WBAN systems, particularly in the context of sustainable healthcare monitoring.