A cross-layer channel access and routing protocol for medical-grade QoS support in wireless sensor networks

One of principal design issues of a Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) for medical information systems is to classify received packets based on their priorities and guarantees so that they can be transmitted reliably, thus satisfying QoS requirements. In addition, when the target WSN requires multi-hop communications and the traffic load increases significantly, it is challenging to support both load balancing and suitable QoS at the same time. In this paper, we propose a new reliable protocol termed Cross-layer Channel Access and Routing (CCAR), which simultaneously supports both MAC and routing operations for medical-grade QoS provisions. CCAR initially determines the routing path with the lowest traffic load and low latency using newly defined channel quality factors. Concurrently, the source node allocates the predefined QoS Access Category to each packet and reserves the channel along the route. In addition, CCAR introduces an effective route maintenance scheme to avoid link failures in bottlenecked intermediate nodes, which prevents unnecessary packet drops and route rediscovery evocations. Finally, through both simulation studies and real test-bed experiments, we evaluate the performance of CCAR by comparing it with other conventional protocols, demonstrating that the proposed protocol can more efficiently support medical-grade QoS packets, especially when the network is heavily loaded.